age
folk is one piece of unreal acting. They are continually asking
themselves whether they are incurring any of the penalties
entailed by infraction of the long table of prohibitions, and
whether they are living up to the foreign garments they wear.
Their faces have, for the most part, an expression of sullen
discontent, they move about silently and joylessly, rebels in
heart to the restrictive code on them, but which they fear to
cast off, partly from a vague apprehension of possible secular
results, and partly because they suppose they will cease to be
good Christians if they do so. They have good ground for their
dissatisfaction. At the time when I visited the villages I have
specially in my eye, it was punishable by fine and imprisonment
to wear native clothing, punishable by fine and imprisonment to
wear long hair or a garland of flowers; punishable by fine or
imprisonment to wrestle or to play at ball; punishable by fine
and imprisonment to build a native-fashioned house; punishable
not to wear shirt and trousers, and in certain localities coat
and shoes also; and, in addition to laws enforcing a strictly
puritanical observation of the Sabbath, it was punishable by fine
and imprisonment to bathe on Sundays. In some other places
bathing on Sunday was punishable by flogging; and to my
knowledge women have been flogged for no other offense. Men in
such circumstances are ripe for revolt, and sometimes the revolt
comes."

An obvious result of reducing the feeling about nakedness to an
unreasoning but imperative convention is the tendency to
prudishness. This, as we know, is a form of pseudo-modesty which,
being a convention, and not a natural feeling, is capable of
unlimited extension. It is by no means confined to modern times
or to Christian Europe. The ancient Hebrews were not entirely
free from prudishness, and we find in the Old Testament that by a
curious euphemism the sexual organs are sometimes referred to as
"the feet." The Turks are capable of prudishness. So, indeed,
were even the ancient Greeks. "Dion the philosopher tells us,"
remarks Clement of Alexandria (_Stromates_, Bk. IV, Ch. XIX)
"that a certain woman, Lysidica, through excess of modesty,
bathed in her clothes, and that Philotera, when she was to enter
the bath, gradually drew back her tunic as th