found who will say that compression is healthful, or a
sculptor who will say that it is beautiful. Which now is the higher
art, the sculptor's or the mantua-maker's? Which is most likely to be
right, the man (or the woman) who devotes his life to the study of
beauty and strength, both in essence and expression, or the woman who
is concerned only with clipping and trimming? Which do you think takes
the more correct view, he who looks upon the human body as God's
handiwork, a thing to be reverenced, to be studied, to be obeyed, or
one who admires it according as it varies more or less from the
standard of a fashion-plate, who considers it as entirely subordinate
to the prevailing mode, and who hesitates at no devices to bring it
down to the desired and utterly arbitrary dimensions? This is what you
do; you give yourselves up into the hands, or you yield submissively to
the opinions, of people who make no account whatever of the form or the
functions of nature; who have never made their profession a liberal
one; who never seem to suspect that God had anything to do with the
human frame; who, whatever station in life they occupy, have not
possessed themselves of the first principles of beauty and grace, while
you ignore the opinions, and lay yourself open to the contempt, of
those whose natural endowments and whose large and varied culture give
them the strongest claim upon your deference. The woman who binds the
human frame into such shapes as haunted the hotels last summer, whether
she be a dressmaker or a Queen of Fashion, is a woman ignorant alike of
the laws of health and beauty; and every woman who submits to such
distortion is either ignorant or weak. The body is fearfully and
wonderfully and beautifully made, a glorious possession, a fair and
noble edifice, the Temple of the Holy Ghost, beautiful its symmetry,
for its adaptations, for its uses; and they who deform and degrade it
by a fashion founded in ignorance, fostered by folly, and fruitful of
woe, are working a work which can be forgiven them only when they know
not what they do.

If this is not true, then I know not what truth is. If it is not a
perfectly plain and patent truth, on the very face of it, then I am
utterly incapable of distinguishing between truth and falsehood. Yet,
if it is true, how account for the tight-lacing among women who are in
a position to be just as intelligent as the doctor and the sculptor are?

Girls, I find a great deal