rmation of an expenditure of $30,000 a
year on dress; one of $70,000 is reported to me from America. I have
seen a bill for dress and lingerie alone, incurred at one shop, for
$35,000 in twelve months.

4

It might be thought that this ghastly picture speaks for itself, but
evidently it does not, as hardly anybody takes any notice of the
question. I will venture to draw attention to the results of what is
happening, ignoring the abnormal figures, because I wish to reason from
what happens all the time rather than from what happens now and then, to
figure the position in which the world finds itself because women do not
hesitate to spend upon their clothes a full ten per cent of the
household income. This figure is correct: such inquiries as I have been
able to make among women of my acquaintance prove it. Out of a joint
income of $12,500 a year one woman spends $1350 a year on clothes;
another, out of $5750 a year, last year $655; a third, out of $8000 a
year $700, but she is a "dowdy."

In households of moderate means, where a certain social status is kept
up, where, for instance, a woman takes $500 a year out of $5000, while
her husband dresses well on $200, when all expenses have been paid,
there is money for little else; fixed charges, children, service, taxes,
swallow up the rest. There is hardly anything left for books, barely for
a circulating library; there is very little for the theater and for
games; holidays are taken in hideous lodgings at the seaside because a
comfortable bungalow costs too much. The money that should have provided
the most important thing in human life, namely pleasure, is on the
woman's back.

In the lower classes the case is, in a way, still worse. I do not mean
workmen's wives, for any old rag will serve the slaves,--but their
daughters! Recently a coroner's inquest in Soho showed that a girl had
practically starved herself to death to buy fine clothes, and it is not
an isolated case. For the last eight years I have been investigating the
condition of workwomen, and, so far as typists, manicurists, and
tea-shop girls are concerned, I assert that their main object in leaving
the homes where they are kept is to have money for smart clothes; they
flood the labor market at blackleg prices, to buy finery and for no
other reason. They go further: while making the necessary inquiries for
my novel, _A Bed of Roses_, I scheduled the cases of about forty London
prostitutes. In about twenty