but because
each of them is the best method of spanning a certain-sized opening, or
resisting a certain weight. The fact, however, that this dress was
generally worn in England two centuries and a half ago shows at least
this, that the right laws of dress have been understood and realised in
our country, and so in our country may be realised and understood again.
As regards the absolute beauty of this dress and its meaning, I should
like to say a few words more. Mr. Wentworth Huyshe solemnly announces
that 'he and those who think with him' cannot permit this question of
beauty to be imported into the question of dress; that he and those who
think with him take 'practical views on the subject,' and so on. Well, I
will not enter here into a discussion as to how far any one who does not
take beauty and the value of beauty into account can claim to be
practical at all. The word practical is nearly always the last refuge of
the uncivilised. Of all misused words it is the most evilly treated. But
what I want to point out is that beauty is essentially organic; that is,
it comes, not from without, but from within, not from any added
prettiness, but from the perfection of its own being; and that
consequently, as the body is beautiful, so all apparel that rightly
clothes it must be beautiful also in its construction and in its lines.

I have no more desire to define ugliness than I have daring to define
beauty; but still I would like to remind those who mock at beauty as
being an unpractical thing of this fact, that an ugly thing is merely a
thing that is badly made, or a thing that does not serve its purpose;
that ugliness is want of fitness; that ugliness is failure; that ugliness
is uselessness, such as ornament in the wrong place, while beauty, as
some one finely said, is the purgation of all superfluities. There is a
divine economy about beauty; it gives us just what is needful and no
more, whereas ugliness is always extravagant; ugliness is a spendthrift
and wastes its material; in fine, ugliness--and I would commend this
remark to Mr. Wentworth Huyshe--ugliness, as much in costume as in
anything else, is always the sign that somebody has been unpractical. So
the costume of the future in England, if it is founded on the true laws
of freedom, comfort, and adaptability to circumstances, cannot fail to be
most beautiful also, because beauty is the sign always of the rightness
of principles, the mystical seal that is set