DRESS IN RELATION TO HEALTH. 183 



Dress in respect to the admission of atmospheric air through it or 

 beneath it to the surface of the body. 



Dress in relation to the color of the material of which it is com- 

 posed. 



Dress in relation to the action of coloring substances which are 

 introduced into its fabric and which come into contact with 

 the surface of the body. 



Cleanliness in dress. 



These are all very serious subjects in respect to dress. If it were 

 on the fashion of dress I had to treat, if I might have permission to 

 lead you, as at a fancy-dress ball, through the historical domain of cos- 

 tume, then I might try to fascinate the most fastidious, and to make 

 the time pass like a dream, in a promenade. Confined to health and 

 dress, I can commit no ecstasy. I must be allowed to criticise, if not 

 to scold, and rarely indeed to find one passing word that stands for 

 commendation. 



Let me, nevertheless, at once state that I have not a syllable of 

 expression to bring forward against good fashion, and good changing 

 fashion in dress. There is nothing whatever incompatible between 

 good fashion and good health ; they may always go well together, and 

 they ought to go together. Naturally, I believe, they would always 

 go together, because they are both good, and two goods can never 

 make a bad. In like manner, bad fashion in dress and bad health go 

 together very often, because two bads can not make a good. For my 

 part, I have never seen a good fashion of dress that was not a healthy 

 fashion, and the world has only been led astray on this matter by the 

 unfortunate circumstance that it has allowed its taste to be directed 

 by the childishness of ignorance. In early times costume, naturally 

 enough, sprang out of innocence. Scientific rules were unknown, and, 

 if we may take the history of primitive nations as true, artistic rules 

 were not supremely developed or carried out. Through long ages 

 fashions varied, mainly on the artistic side, approaching only toward 

 scientific necessity in cases where arctic cold or tropical heat enforced 

 some kind of consideration for the person who had to be clothed. 

 Later in more modern and scientific times, fashion has been governed 

 by the most superficial, vain, and imprudent of so-called artistes and 

 fashion-leaders, who have invented modes out of their own little heads, 

 and have set Nature at defiance, as if they were Nature, and she were 

 an idiot thereby changing places with her in the most complacent 

 manner. 



Let me say further even than this : I commend good fashion and 

 fine, nay exquisite, taste in dress as a good thing of itself, indepen- 

 dently of health. I agree entirely with Mrs. Haweis that it is the 

 bounden duty of every woman to make herself look as handsome as 

 ever she can. If she have natural beauty, she ought to study how to 

 maintain it in and through every period of her life yes to the last ; 



