om women themselves. They alone are responsible for one of
the most fruitful causes of their wretchedness. The theme is a
threadbare one. We approach it without hardly any hope that we shall do
good by repeated warnings utterly monotonous and tiresome. But still
less can we feel comfortable in mind to pass it over in silence. We
refer to the foolish and injurious pressure which is exerted on the
lower part of the chest and the abdomen by tight corsets, belts, and
bands to support the under-clothing; in other words,

TIGHT LACING.

Why it is, by what strange freak of fashion and blindness to artistic
rules, women of the present day think that a deformed and
ill-proportioned waist is a requisite of beauty, we do not know.
Certainly they never derived such an idea from a contemplation of those
monuments of perfect beauty bequeathed to posterity by the chisels of
Attic artists, nor from those exquisite figures which lend to the canvas
of Titian and Raphael such immortal fame. Look, for instance, at that
work of the former artist, now rendered so familiar by the
chromo-lithographic process, called 'Titian's Daughter.' It is the
portrait of a blonde-haired maiden holding aloft a trencher heaped with
fruits. She turns her face to the beholder, leaning slightly backward to
keep her equilibrium. Her waist is encircled by a zone of pearls; and it
is this waist we would have our readers observe with something more than
an aesthetic eye. It is the waist of health as well as beauty. Narrower
than either the shoulders or the hips, it is yet anything than that
'wasplike waist,' which is so fashionable a deformity. With such a
waist, a woman is fitted to pass through her married state with health
and pleasure. There is little fear that she will be the tenant of
doctors' chairs, and the victim of drugs and instruments. Let women aim
at beauty, let them regard it as a matter of very high importance, worth
money and time and trouble, and we will applaud them to the echo. But
let them not mistake deformity, vicious shape, unnatural and injurious
attitudes, and hurtful distortions for beauty. That not only degrades
their physical nature, but it lowers their tastes, and places them in
aesthetics on a level with the Indian squaw who flattens her head and
bores her nose, and with the Chinese woman who gilds her teeth, and
compresses her foot into a shapeless mass. True beauty is ever
synonymous with health; and the woman who, out of subserv