in. Avaunt, thou grand sycophant of the
nineteenth century, thou vile usurper of the people's throne!

Oh, American women, be exhorted to flee from the sorceress whose
enchantments are binding you in the silken chains of an ignoble
effeminacy. Your weakness weakens our nation and sends a destructive
palsy down into succeeding generations. Your loss of strength is
humanity's loss. How can there be individual identity where Fashion
rules? how individual taste, individual opinion, individual virtue and
character? How can there be genius and talent where Fashion molds the
will and cuts the life to a pattern? How can there be wisdom where
Fashion dictates the mode of thought and the form of utterance? How can
there be greatness where Fashion shapes the growth and prescribes its
bounds? There is nothing in our country so paralyzing to the growth of
mind and the progress of righteous principles as the easy and general
conquest of Fashion over our people. If it were only in matters of dress
and equipage, of outward adornment, that it bore sway, it would not be
so ruinous. But it goes into every department of thought and life, into
opinions, principles, religion. It shapes the creed, prescribes the form
of worship, and puts its excommunicating ban upon all heresy. It enters
the sweet retreat of home and poisons its love and life. It sets up its
proud form in the sanctuary and dishonors worship with its cold
formality. Everywhere it is a godless tyrant. To develop our strength
of body and mind we want freedom. Genius expands its wings in freedom's
airs. Health blooms in freedom's prairie-fields. Wisdom grows in the
hermit-cells of individual thought where no binding chains of custom
cramp the mental powers. Love is always truest and sweetest and noblest
where it is freest. Nature is freedom's temple. No forming shears of
Fashion cuts her patterns. She grows every leaf, and opens every flower,
and solemnizes every bird-marriage, and utters every hymn of praise in
the truthful and innate spontaneity of her universal soul. So humanity
should be free; not free to sin with impunity, but free to dress
according to its own individual taste and comfort; free to live in homes
arranged without respect to Fashion, but agreeable to the wants and
interests of their members; free to eat and swear and act as seemeth
good in each one's mental sight; free to think and speak on all the
great subjects of human interest; to believe and worship by the