h her to this
country.

These principles are teachable things. Let her once grasp them and the
vagaries of style will become as distasteful as poor drawing does to
one whose eye has learned what is correct, as lying is to one who has
cultivated the taste for the truth.

Martha Berry tells of an illuminating experience in her school of
Southern mountain girls. She had taken great pains to teach them
correct standards and principles of dress. She had been careful to see
that simplicity and quality and fitness were all that they saw in the
dress of their teachers. Then one day they had visitors, fashionable
visitors, in hobble skirts and strange hats and jingling with many
ornaments. They were good and interesting women, and they talked
sympathetically and well to the girls. Miss Berry was crushed. "What
will the girls think of my teachings?" she asked herself. "They will
believe I do not know." But that night one of her assistants said to
her: "I have just overheard the girls discussing our visitors. They
liked them so much, but they are saying that it is such a pity that
they could not have had you to _teach them how to dress_."

As a method of education, instruction in the principles of dress is
admirable for a girl. Through it she can be made to grasp the truth
which women so generally suspect to-day; that is, the _importance of
the common and universal things of life_; the fact that all these
everyday processes are the expressions of the great underlying truths
of life. A girl can be taught, too, through this matter of dress, as
directly perhaps as through anything that concerns her, the importance
of studying human follies! Follies grow out of powerful human
instincts, ineradicable elements of human nature. They would not exist
if there were not at the bottom of them some impulse of nature, right
and beautiful and essential. The folly of woman's dress lies not in
her instinct to make herself beautiful, it lies in her ignorance of
the principles of beauty, of the intimate and essential connection
between utility and beauty. It lies in the pitiful assumption that she
can achieve her end by imitation, that she can be the thing she envies
if she look like that thing.

The matter of dress is the more important, because bound up with it is
a whole grist of social and economic problems. It is part and parcel
of the problem of the cost of living, of woman's wages, of wasteful
industries, of the social evil itself. It is