as follows:

"The male members of a family may be opposed to the maiming
of their female relatives by the senseless custom, but the
women will support it. One Chinese even promised his
daughter a dollar a day to keep her natural feet, and
another, having failed with his older girls, arranged that
his youngest should be under his personal supervision night
and day. The one natural-footed girl was sought in marriage
for the dollars that had been faithfully laid by for her.
But at her new home she was so _ridiculed_ by the hundreds
who came to see her--and her feet--that she lost her reason.
The other girl also became insane as a result of the
_persecutions_ which she had to endure."

Thus we see that what keeps up this hideous custom is not the women's
desire to arouse the esthetic admiration and amorous passion of the
_men_ by a hoof of beauty, but the fear of ridicule and persecution by
the other women, slaves of fashion all. These same motives are the
source of most of the ugly fashions prevalent even in civilized Europe
and America. Theophile Gautier believed that most women had no sense
of beauty, but only a sense of fashion; and if explorers and
missionaries had borne in mind the fundamental difference between
fashion and esthetics, anthropological literature would be the poorer
by hundreds of "false facts" and ludicrous inferences.[113]

The ravages of fashion are aggravated by emulation, which has its
sources in vanity and envy. This accounts for the extremes to which
mutilations and fashions often go among both, civilized and
uncivilized races, and of which a startling instance will be described
in detail in the next paragraph. Few of our rich women wear their
jewels because of their intrinsic beauty. They wear them for the same
reason that Polynesian or African belles wear all the beads they can
get. In Mariner's book on the Tongans (Chap. XV.) there is an amusing
story of a chiefs daughter who was very anxious to go to Europe. Being
asked why, she replied that her great desire was to amass a large
quantity of beads and then return to Tonga, "because in England beads
are so common that no one would admire me for wearing them, and _I
should not have the pleasure of being envied."_ Bancroft (I., 128)
says of the Kutchin Indians: "_Beads are their wealth,_ used in the
place of money, and the rich among them literally load themselves with
necklaces and