Wisconsin State Agricultural Society. 
439 
given. That there is an incurable vein of folly in the race one is 
led to fear in reading medical advertisements, and in observing the 
-servitude of dress. That woman should throw away half her birth¬ 
right of physical liberty and free, open-air pleasures, for reasons so 
obscure and slight that no two can render them alike, is sufficient 
proof that our life is yet an underground stem, rooted in the dark¬ 
ness of irrational impulses, and only here and there creeping into 
the light. The Chinese foot, after all, is no eccentricity; it is rath¬ 
er the typical fact of fashion. 
It were well if this cumbersome out-rigging of dress were noth¬ 
ing more than a burden and superfluity. Some make a worse use 
of it than this, by insisting on regarding it as serviceable, and not 
providing adequate, independent under-garments for real warmth 
and shelter. Hence women, though more warmly dressed than 
formerly, are still less adequately clothed than men. The heavy 
sock, the sturdy boot, the double-thickness of the closest woolen 
fabrics, find no equivalents in a woman’s garments. Delicate girls, 
who suffer most from exposure, are habituated to it in a form that 
would be intolerable to their rugged brothers. We need not urge 
the constraint and burden put upon the vital organs. Those who 
sacrifice the outer life will hardly spare the inner life, and to crowd 
and corner the one, and embarrass and perplex the other, trampling 
upon comfort and safety alike in the pursuit of some fanciful idea of 
beauty, have always been easy to those who have shared the intoxi¬ 
cation, and felt the wild delirium of fashion. Only here and there 
has been found a mind sober enough to respect its own physical 
life, sound enough to guard its own pleasures, sensible enough to 
divine the beauty of health and strength. 
After protection and freedom, neatness, a wholesome reserve as 
regards contact and soil, would seem to be a cardinal quality of 
dress. Here the failure is no less conspicuous than in previous par¬ 
ticulars, and is the more painful as all tidy qualities and cleanly de¬ 
vices take refuge from man’s persecution under the sheltering hand 
of women. Alas for us when the Holy of Holies is less immaculate 
than the court of the Gentiles. What word can we use not too foul 
for language wherewith to express the condition of skirts that have 
swept up, mingled and stored away in their ample folds the filth, 
varying and manifold, of the streets! Moreover, this is an unclean¬ 
ness of long standing. Says Chaucer of our ancestors of five hun- 
