see "what a deformed thief this fashion is," and would laugh at the squeezed-in waist, the crinolette, and the foot mangled and crushed by high-heeled and pointed boots of recent times, as much as we now, who call ourselves civilized, ridicule the Australian with his nosepeg, or the Bongo negro, who drags his lips down with a plug, and distends the lobes of his ears with discs of wood, in order to increase his personal attractions, or the foot of a Chinese lady artificially deformed in accordance with a fashion which is, after all, only a slight exaggeration of our own.
All over the world, "Il faut souffrir pour être belle," seems to have been the motto of men and women alike, and, strong in that conviction, they have borne, and bear, without a murmur, heavy weights, heat and cold, pinchings and squeezings which displace the vital organs and produce all sorts of deformities, and, in fact, a series of tortures which, if they, instead of being inflicted by such an impersonal tyrant as Fashion, had been enforced by any individual monarch, would have speedily brought his head to the scaffold, and have caused his name to be handed down to posterity as that of the cruellest of men and worst of kings.
In this connection it is interesting to quote the words of a thoughtful writer, Mrs. Oliphant, who, in her book on dress, after reviewing some of the historical changes of costume, says, "The reader will see from this rapid survey how persistently fashion has sought the inconvenient and unnatural in opposition to the merely useful and pretty, and
