ON PEOPLE CLOTHING. 315 
any obstruction to the free return of their contents to the 
heart. 
From the head and neck we may pass to the body. One of 
the great objects of clothing is to keep the body, independent 
of the head and extremities, warm. Hence the great bulk of 
all kinds of garments are attached to the body by belts, braces, 
stays, bandages, and other devices. We need hardly refer 
here to the now exploded practice of swaddling children in 
innumerable folds of bandages. This practice is now pursued 
amongst barbarous races, but the evils attendant upon it are 
generally perceived amongst intelligent communities. It still, 
however, occasionally happens that the clothes of an infant aro 
so tightly placed round its body, as seriously to interfere with 
the proper functions of the lungs, and lead to diseases which 
end in death. 
The active occupations of men have led them very generally 
to dispense with body- clothing that seriously interferes with 
the muscles of respiration, and the functions of the abdominal 
viscera. Those men who are not beyond the reach of the 
caprices of fashion, have sometimes adopted a dress which has 
involved a very grave departure from that freedom of move- 
ment of the muscles of the body which is essential to health. 
It is, however, in the other sex that a style of dress has been 
adopted which is open to the strongest possible condemnation, 
from its dangerous compression of the body. The loose robes 
of the women of antiquity have been exchanged for the ban- 
dages and corsets of modern dress. This system has resulted 
in the adoption of articles of dress, which not only compress 
the blood-vessels of the body, producing congestion, but 
restrain the action of those muscles which are essential to the 
proper movement of the whole body, and the due performance 
of the functions of respiration. A further evil has been demon- 
strated, in the fact that these articles of dress being worn by 
growing girls, the skeleton of the body has been actually dis- 
torted by the artificial pressure, and personal deformity has 
been the result. This has not been an exceptional result ; 
whole classes of our countrywomen have laboured under this 
deformity, and the only class amongst them in which the 
thorax has been allowed free development is that which, perform- 
ing the labour of men, have found out that an artificial method of 
dressing is incompatible with their work. The reign of fashion 
lias perhaps recently relaxed in some measure in this respect ; 
but the idea of woman as to what should constitute the central 
portion of her dress, must be revolutionized before we can 
expect this dangerous and deforming system of dress to be 
abolished. There ought to be no tampering with it, and a 
new idea of comeliness in female dress must be substituted, if 
