Wisconsin State Agricultural Society. 449 
plaits, that, speak only of the scanty protection and uncompensated 
discomforts of poverty. Nothing could look as badly, constructed 
on principles of use, as do these shabby outlines of showy dress, 
descending upon those to whom they bring neither the solace of 
vanity nor the protection of service. To these fickle, vexatious, and 
ill-adapted styles of our Christian life, we oppose the sturdy sense 
of the Turk, the Chinaman, or Malay, who, with loose pants and 
flowing jacket, meet composedly a thousand years. 
Have we not fairly made this point, much as we have improved 
in dress, there is still room for improvement in the simplicity of its 
construction, the freedom it shall confer, and in its graceful 
adaptation to the human form, to the exclusion of artificial, com¬ 
plex, and meaningless outline. 
Society is a system of delicate dependencies and reciprocal respon¬ 
sibilities. There are few actions, the motives and reasons of which 
are not found in large part beyond the constitution and character 
of those who perform them in the character and constitution of so¬ 
ciety. Society revolves by the meshing of many wheels into each 
other, and the size, form, revolution of each wheel are determined by 
those adjacent. The vanity of a wife and daughter is also the van¬ 
ity of a husband and father, and the frivolity and feebleness of one 
sex are the election of both. 
It would certainly seem unkind and unjust to hold the nation re¬ 
sponsible for every folly the Grant family may perpetrate. Yet 
Mrs. Fred. Grant would have fewer motives to make her undercloth¬ 
ing that astonishing thing that we are assured it is, were there 
not papers ready to devote a column or half column to telling us 
all about it, what it cost, how many bones were included in her bri¬ 
dal-corset, and at what points the perfumes were stitched in. When 
we erect a hot-house for fools we must expect to raise a few. 
Female character and dress are what they are by the ordina¬ 
tion, the constitution of society. Their alteration will involve a 
wide revolution of ideas and cannot be accomplished directly, in¬ 
stantly, as one puts on or off a coat. We are the more willing to 
criticise dress, because we know that it unconsciously springs from 
and expresses the spontaneous and wide-spread tendencies of men, 
and indicates in its excellencies and in its defects, the emotional, re¬ 
ciprocal. reactionary relations of the sexes. Women are extreme, 
persistent, sensitive in dress, because they meet eyes, that with 
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