450 
Annual Report of tiie 
slight intellectual discrimination, go in search of this tawdry show. 
If one-half of the community are to be fed through their senses, it 
will be laid as a duty on the remaining half to feed them; and we 
can only withhold the food as we arrest the appetite. We doubt 
whether anywhere the real relation of the sexes, the essential de¬ 
pendence of the one, and the courteous yet sensual tyranny of the 
other, find better expression than in a fashionable assembly. Many 
captives and rich spoils were not more necessary to the sturdy Ro¬ 
man general, attending him in his triumph and gracing his power, 
than are richly dressed women, in the wantonness of physical effect, 
to the libertine, or to the sober citizen who looks upon their posses¬ 
sion as the last luxury of social life, the final symbol of wealth and 
position. That the real dignity, knowledge, power of woman, the 
free, intelligent, happy government of her life should be largely 
sacrificed to appearances that are in the last analysis sensual, ground¬ 
ed neither in utility nor in taste, finding no upward bent either in the 
gains of body or mind, stamp society, and that, too, in its most 
brilliant manifestations, among its alleged victories of elegant re¬ 
finement, as essentially gross, humbling its brightest and best pos¬ 
sessions and those who should be its redeeming spirits to an inter¬ 
course running on the low grade of sensuous impressions, and this 
also more profoundly in the under-current of thought than in the 
upper-current of language and appearance. 
To alter dress, therefore, to correct the tastes which now give it 
law, is to profoundly alter society; to give more purity, more spirit¬ 
ual insight to men, a disposition to a more generous partnership 
in their intellectual life; and to women, a more sturdy self-respect, 
an opportunity more deeply to develop and' freely to assert their 
individuality, an ability to bring in an untrammeled way their own 
contributions to the material and spiritual wealth of the race. 
Many other things are influential in the regeneration of society, 
but few things would call for a more thorough correction of low 
instinctive tendencies and stolid judgments, which men and women 
have brought with them out of barbarism, have been busy since the 
flood in confirming, as a street is trampled hard by hob-nails and 
gaiters, than a return of dress, in both sexes, to the simple uses of 
life and those adornments which these ends, taken in connection 
with the supremac3 T of character, admit of. More than equal laws, 
more than joint education, more than free labor, more than the 
