tween the sexes
that the world lost and is now slowly regaining.

Times have changed since Adam: the apron of his honest anxious
handicraft--for it was the penalty of his sin that he would never be
happy until he got it finished and put it on--has undergone many
changes, in the course of which even its evolution into Plymouth Rock
Pants, yes even those once seemingly eternal lines,--

When the pant-hunter pantless
Is panting for pants,--

are now fading from human memory; yet until within the past few decades
a gentleman had a tailor as inexorably as he had a nose. But now the
immemorial visit to his tailor is no longer absolutely necessary. He
may, if such is his inclination,--as I am sure it would have been
Adam's,--get his new suit all finished and ready-to-wear. Charley Wax,
the sartorially Perfect Gentleman, smiles invitation and encouragement
from many a window; an army of elegant and expeditious employees, each
as much like Charley Wax as is humanly possible, waits to conduct him to
a million ready-to-wear suits. His intellect is appealed to by the
plausible argument that we live in a _busy time_, in which the _leaders
of men_ simply cannot _afford to waste_ their valuable hours by going to
the tailor: at the ready-to-wear emporium you simply pay your money and
take your choice.

Many a gentleman, suddenly discovering that he is a 'leader of men,' has
deserted his tailor: many a gentleman, learning by experience that it
takes as long to try on clothes in one place as another, has presently
gone back to him. Starting with the democratic premise that all men are
born equal, the ready-to-wear clothier proceeds on the further
assumption that each man becomes in time either short, stout, or
medium; and this amendment to the Declaration of Independence has indeed
created a new republic of shorts, stouts, and mediums, in which Charley
Wax is the perpetual president. Here, indeed, would seem to be a step
toward patterns for gentlemen: one sees the gentleman in imagination
happily cutting out his new spring suit on the dining-room table, or
sitting cross-legged on that centre of domestic hospitality, while he
hums a little tune to himself and merrily sews the sections together.

But unfortunately the shorts, stouts, and mediums are not respectively
standard according to bust-measure. A gentleman, for example, may
simultaneously be short in the legs, medium in the chest, and stout in
the circumference: the secr