eal of getting into
their glove-fitting dress waists. Many young women to-day, yielding to
the spell of fashion, place the corset next to their flesh, while a
still greater number have merely the thinnest possible undershirt
between the flesh and the corset, after which they tightly draw the
dress waist until it meets. This seems incredible, but it is vouched
for by several ladies of my acquaintance, among whom are physicians
whose large practice among their sisters gives them peculiar
facilities for knowing the absolute facts. Health, posterity, and all
the instincts of the higher self are ruthlessly sacrificed to the
fickle folly of fashion's criminal caprice. And we must not forget
that even now the sweeping train is coming in vogue and correctly
attired ladies must consent to carry the germs of death with
quantities of filth from the streets of our metropolitan cities into
their homes of wealth and refinement. The corset and high-heeled
shoes, the two most deadly foes to maternity and posterity, are also
seen at the present time, on every hand.

If outraged nature could show the procession of mothers sacrificed on
fashion's altar during the past generation, or unveil the suffering
and deformity being borne by posterity at the present time, through
this slavery, the world would be thrilled with an indescribable
horror. Health, comfort, and human life have paid the penalty of a
criminal servitude to the modern juggernaut, before whose car millions
of our women are bowing in abject servility, knowing full well that at
each turn of its wheel new pains or fresh diseases will be inflicted.
And what power controls and gives life to this mistress of modern
civilization? At whose behest is this crime against reason, life, and
posterity perpetrated? _The cupidity of the shrewd and unscrupulous
and the caprice of the shallow and frivolous._

[Illustration: Vagaries of Fashion. A belle in the eighties.]

[Illustration: Vagaries of Fashion. A belle early in the sixties.]

The moral aspect of this subject is even more grave than the
hygienic. Anything which injures the physical body, whether it be
licentiousness, intemperance, gluttony, or vicious modes of dress, is
necessarily evil from an ethical point of view. Not simply because the
law of our being decrees that whatever drains or destroys the physical
vitality must sooner or later sap the vital forces of the brain; but
also because anything is ethically destructive which