and been; the whole external universe and what it holds is but clothing; and the essence of all science lies in the philosophy of clothes." And again, "Is not the fair fabric of society itself, with its royal mantles and pontifical stoles, whereby, from nakedness and dismemberment, we are organized into polities, into nations, and a whole co-operating mankind, the creation, as has often been irrefragably evinced, of the tailor alone?" On the contrary, well do we know besides, with that cynical professor, that clothes are the invention of the arch-enemy of mankind, or, at least, that his interference in earthly affairs led to their introduction, and moreover, that so originating with the father of lies, they cannot be expected to be perfectly truthful. But, therefore, our aim should be all the more, while accepting the inevitable, to demonstrate that woman in this present era is more worthy than her clothes, and by improving the truthfulness of her form and the untruthfulness of them, to shame the very devil.

Retrospectively going back just fifty years, and confining our attention to this country, we shall find that evolution in politics, society, and clothes have been coincident in time. Politics having no relation to clothes in the aesthetic sense, being more often found in company with-seediness, the last two conditions, which are intimately associated, alone invite our attention. Just fifty years ago California was not thought of, Chicago was only three years old, Dickens was describing New York as a long, flat, straggling city, while Philadelphia had been built only about half-way across from the Delaware to the Schuylkill. Scattering F. F.V.'s represented, in the North as well as in the South, the cream of society. Only the three hundred (leaving out the Thespians) of Thermopyla were known to fame, the six hundred had not charged at Balaclava, and the four hundred had not emerged from the hoary ancestry of New York. The nouveaux riches lived and died unknown.

Society in all ranks plodded on from year to year with scarcely any but the local excitements of a schützen park or of a volunteer-fireman's fight; the universal plethora finding at last some relief in the blood-letting of the aggressive Mexican war. That over, the humdrum of national and social existence returned, tempered by the ever-present social sentiment of all communities. as to how we apples swim.

Then came the first event since the Revolution which profoundly stirred the pulses of the people. Amidst it, all social lines were swept away, and out of a heterogeneous people living under one government came to the great majority a deep sense of nationality. Fused and welded in the fierce heat of the war, the diverse elements, and even the side which finally broke away, shattered under the momentum of the advancing hosts, learned to recognize and admit that, after all, blood is thicker than water, and that it now, more firmly than ever before, cements the bond of union. Destruction untold there was, of course, during this fearful time, blight of all sorts, but from them has emerged a nation feeling in almost every individual man that its destiny lies within itself to be the most favored and powerful upon earth.

What social phase's had been exhibited during that quarter of a century! The population at the beginning (1840), of not quite twenty millions, was, by the end of the war, about twice. that amount, dispersed over an immense territory, its greatest density still upon the Atlantic sea-board. The primitive times from the Revolution, lingering in 1840, when many children still attended the public schools of the city bare-foot, had been gradually disappearing, by the beginning of the war had almost gone, and by the end of it had finally departed. Ideas of comfort, luxury, manners, dress, had become, however correct or otherwise, common property. Dwellings there had been plenty in 1840, architecture scarcely any. The wood-fire, so

delightful now to the fancy, was in 1840 still lingering in oldfashioned houses, having roasted the preceding generations in the face while it left their backs to freeze. The beginning of the century had seen people not even properly shod for inclemencies of weather. Our grandfathers and great-grandfathers got along pretty well, for, about the beginning of the century, except for dress occasions, they had given up small-clothes and adopted the much-ridiculed pantaloons. When they went abroad in rain, hail, or snow, they put on stout boots; but their helpmates, as late as 1840, were still wearing paper-soled slippers over their white-stockinged feet, crossed by laces which passed behind the ankle and were tied in front. If they must needs brave the weather, they had no other resource than to drag on primitive round-toed rubber shoes, which, if cold, required thawing out before they could be got on even at the expense of exertions which would have cost a saint his canonization. Underclothing was not so suitable or profuse in quantity as it is now, and we much fear that the heirlooms of ivory hands on ebony staffs betoken that the skin at the beginning of the century was not in so hygienic a condition as it is at present. Despite the fact of the existence of the sturdy souls that history depicts as the almost invariable possession of the women of the Revolutionary period, and the sturdy bodies which portraits often represent them to have had, it is the fact, that after the beginning of the century, up to about 1840, American women of the better classes did not give evidence of anything like exuberant health. First of all, it is not to be expected that any people can in a few generations become reconciled to the entirely new conditions which cease to manifest themselves in the system by what we call acclimatization. They were in the cities, as country women generally are now, too much housed, took too little exercise, had too little amusement, and were not healthfully clothed. The year 1840 saw the remnants of the decaying

practice of excruciatingly tight-lacing, of which a concomitant was an occasional fainting fit in company, associated with much sympathy among women for such sweet sensibility, although some of the ungodly did titter as they snipped the laces of the guiltily refractory stays. Albums were indispensable adjuncts as safety-valves of sentiment among girls, where platonic friendship luxuriantly flourished. The tendency of the times was humdrum, narrow, and lackadaisical, toward nervous constitution, and to types physically far inferior to those which are familiar to us now.

A new era set in about 1850, of which the dawn was scarcely perceptible ten years before, and steadily advanced in the phys ical and mental culture of women, in which the progress since has been truly astonishing. Much as remains to be done, vicious as are the relics of the former unhygienic life, in need of air, exercise, and healthful dress, women stand, as it were, on a mountaintop of freedom compared with their condition only fifty years ago. Those most favored of fortune, who are at the same time endowed with good sense, leave in their behalf scarcely anything to be desired. Most seem to be in some degree advancing. If we see many stragglers, it must be recognized that such must ever be present in the march of progress. They serve at least to make conspicuous the merit of those who lead the van.

The chief rule for the promotion of beauty are the seeking of fresh air, cleanliness of person, moderate exercise, nutritious, palatable, and varied food, unfettered body and limbs, regular work, with occasional amusement, and regularity of habits in walking and sleeping. Of all else, subservient to these, we shall, as in duty bound, speak when we come to details, in their proper place. We repeat that the present generation is far superior in health and beauty to those generations which have preceded it. The same improved conditions which have led to this consummation are still operative to raise future generations to a still

higher plane of being. The Countess of Jersey said lately, in an article in The Nineteenth Century, repudiating the idea that in England village-girls are not so robust as they were :

Granting, however, as beside the present question, that village-girls are not so sturdy as they used to be, is it possible for any one with the most elementary powers and opportunities for observation to deny that the majority of girls "in society" are not only as strong as their predecessors of, say, thirty years ago, but that they are finer and taller than these were, and possess a greater air of health and vitality? . . . . The young lady, with fur around her boots, and her charming companions stand shivering on the brink of the pond, and never think of assuming the skates of which Mr. Winkle is so sternly deprived. To have possessed any boots at all must have been a considerable advance on the practice of earlier days; as both the text and illustrations of old novels represent the heroines as walking about in the country in thin shoes. Miss Edgeworth's Angelina, in L'Amie Inconnue, wanders on the Welsh mountains in slippers "of the thinnest kid-leather," and we are not surprised to learn that, when she lost her way, one fell off and the other was cut through by the

stones.

If these things are true of the England of to-day, how much more wide-spread the favorable change of which the Countess speaks is in this country, where prosperity is far more widely diffused than in England. If, by taking thought, it is not possible within a life-time to increase one's stature by a cubit, it is at least, as experience is proving, possible and certain, by the observance of hygienic laws to strengthen and beautify the person, and to leave the precious gift to posterity.

The concomitant social aspects of the war-times were not less striking in their way than were the political convulsion, upheaval, and recasting of outgrown conditions. Social barriers, as was noted, were completely broken down; rich men, as such, first appeared prominently upon the scene of affairs; society reorganized upon a more liberal, more luxurious, and less virtuous basis. The demi-mondaine, far more influential than the Greek hetaira had ever been, imposed her laws of dress across the ocean. Some American women could even copy her lines of languor that mean debauchery, while all, more or less knowingly or unknowingly, were chained, under penalty of ridicule,