t for sea-bathing--that a
busy man could slip on in the morning and off again at night. All our
indignation to the contrary, we prefer the complicated and difficult: we
enjoy our buttons; we are withheld only by our queer sex-pride from
wearing garments that button up in the back--indeed, on what we frankly
call our 'best clothes,' we _have the buttons_ though we _dare not
button_ with them. The one costume that a man could slip on at night and
off again in the morning has never, if he could help it, been worn in
general society, and is now outmoded by a pretty little coat and
pantaloons of soft material and becoming color. We come undressed; but
behold! thousands of years before we were born, it was decided that we
must be dressed as soon as possible afterward, and clothes were made for
us while it was yet in doubt whether we would be a little gentleman or a
little lady. And so a man's first clothes are cunningly fashioned to do
for either; worse still,--a crying indignity that, oh, thank Heaven, he
cannot remember in maturity,--he is forcibly valeted by a woman, very
likely young and attractive, to whom he has never been formally
introduced.

But with this nameless, speechless, and almost invertebrate thing that
he once was--this little kicking Maeterlinck (if I may so call it)
between the known and the unknown worlds--the mature self-dresser will
hardly concern himself. Rather, it may be, will he contemplate the
amazing revolution which, in hardly more than a quarter-century, has
reversed public opinion, and created a free nation which, no longer
regarding a best-dresser with fine democratic contempt, now seeks, with
fine democratic unanimity, to be a best-dresser itself. Or perhaps,
smiling, he will recall Dr. Jaeger, that brave and lonely spirit who
sought to persuade us that no other garment is so comfortable, so
hygienic, so convenient, and so becoming to all figures, as the union
suit--and that it should be worn externally, with certain modifications
to avoid arrest. His photograph, thus attired, is stamped on memory: a
sensible, bearded gentleman, inclining to stoutness, comfortably dressed
in eye-glasses and a modified union suit. And then, almost at the same
moment, the Clothing Industry, perhaps inspired by the doctor's courage
and informed by his failure, started the revolution, since crowned by
critical opinion, in a Sunday newspaper, that 'The American man,
considering him in all the classes that constitu