on the infant's body, so that it can breathe easily and freely; and see to it, ye mothers; that you do not spoil the health and morals of your daughters by lacing them, or by even encouraging it. If you catch them fastening their clothes tight, tear them open, and explain to them the evils of compressing the organs of animal life.
5. To you, fathers, I make an appeal. If your wives are so destitute of physiological knowledge, and so full of fashionable foolery, and, withal, so anxious to marry off your daughters, as to make them follow this pernicious fashion in order to make a match, do you interpose a father's counsel; (and, if your daughters have been duly trained, your advice alone will be sufficient;) and caution them not to marry any one who likes them a whit the better for tight-lacing; for such a husband will never support them or make them happy.
Lastly, but most emphatically, I call upon you, ye daughters of Zion, ye lovers of the Lord, ye professed followers of the meek and lowly Jesus, I call upon you, totally to abstain from this practice, and to frown upon all who follow it. If there be one self-contradiction or anomaly greater than another, it is a Miss Religious Small-Wajst. I do not certainly know but there might possibly be such a thing as a Christian drunkard, or a religious rascal, or a praying cheat and liar; but I really do not see how it is possible for tight-lacers ever to enter the kingdom of heaven. If so, it must be 'so as by fire.' To lace tight is to commit suicide and infanticide, as already shown; and can suicides and infanticides be Christians! If so, let me not be one. Such love the young bucks and foppish beaux far better than their 'Lord and Master.' Quite too many of our female professors of religion, evidently go to church more to show their small waists, than to worship. How can ye profane the sanctuary with your corsets, your cotton paddings, and your bustles ? How can ye sing the praises of your God, or bow 'before Jehovah's awful throne,' in devout adoration or praise, with the circulation retarded, and your minds enfeebled and distracted by the uncomfortable or painful stays! It always shocks me—it reverses my veneration—it strikes me as a great profanation of God and things sacred, to see a tight-laced lady enter or leave the sanctuary with her gilt-edged prayer book or Bible. I should as soon think of joining a company of tavern-loungers, as a church that allowed tight-lacing; for the latter is as bad, and its evils are as great, in my estimation, as those of drunkenness.
Once more, ye daughters of Zion—once again I call upon you to remember your standing and influence. Occupying as you do the very pinnacle of influence, your example does more to break or to perpetuate this practice, than almost any other influence that can be brought to bear upon it. Yet, which way does that all-powerful influence bear? It bears as strongly in favour of tight-lacing, as your corset-strings do upon your waists! Do you really suppose your Saviour thinks any the more of you for being corseted.? Then why do it, especially when you go to sing his praises and to engage in his worship? What possible motive, drawn from religion, can a pious woman have for tight-lacing? No more than she can have for taking arsenic! Tight-lacing is incompatible with Christianity, or else I do not understand either its precepts or its principles.
