CHAPTER XXI.

THE FEET.

N°

portion of the body is more imposed upon than is the civilized foot. It alone, including in lesser degree, because numerically much fewer, the waists of some silly women who have no appreciation of what in feminine attributes pleases the eye of man, leads a life of durance vile and wretchedness that degrade and transmit evidence of previous servile condition to posterity. We do not, as that expression implies, place the two kinds of bondage in the same category as to degree of iniquity. We cite the two cases together, merely as representing the only two in which the human body is in civilization constrained to its manifest injury and degradation. The gartering of some women below, instead of above, the knee is not a hygienic nor a beautifying mode of securing the stocking, for it impedes circulation in the part and vulgarizes the contour of the calf of the leg; but that practice is a trifle, not in comparison worth mentioning.

An excessively small waist may be a sign of maidenhood, but suggests sexual deficiency, and in lessening sexual attraction defeats the end of its constriction. Ex pede Herculem, from a mere fragment we can judge of the whole person, says the Latin proverb, and no woman with a wasp-waist will ever persuade a man that it can merge into the grand contours of bosom and fine hips, any more than he can think of a rill as directly related to the ocean. Similarly we may say of the feet, that they, as well as the hands, symbolize the whole person. Their undue constraint results in destroying their natural accord with the person, and at the same time in lessening grace through restricted liberty of movement. There are men who lace, but

very few, and men who wear tight boots, but comparatively very few. It is civilized woman, of not the highest type of the civilization by which she is surrounded, who is the sinner in these respects.

We Americans are the greatest inventors of the world. Even Dickens, who was no lover of us nationally, although fond of our ducats, conceded that only Americans had discovered what to do with the small of the back," they sit on it," he said. But, while we are the greatest inventors of the world, we are also the most servile imitators. Thousands of men, while pretending politically to look down upon the Britisher, anxiously copy his speech, his accent, and clothes. The fair sex, to a woman, without any similar pretense, frankly yields allegiance to Parisian rule in dress. It is not the Britisher, however, who has changed within a decade or two, his conceit pointing as steadily as ever to himself, as points the needle to the pole; nor the French either, whose self-satisfaction in supremacy within their own domain could not well be less than it is as undisputed. But, if we can be so original as we have proved ourselves, why cannot we stand in all respects more confidently alone? Granting the claims of fashion, yet there is a point where reason would seem to be more capable than it proves to be in dealing with fashion's follies in the interest even of the object of fashion,— to increase attraction. Has it never struck American women who have been addicted to wearing the most damaging of French shoes, in which a Parisian never thinks of walking, but reserves for the house or carriage, that the native-born type to which they belong is so singularly endowed with small hands and feet, in some parts of country verging on the danger-line of beauty, which we have indeed seen overpassed, that they have no need of affecting this elegance as if they had it not? If this be true, as can be proved by statistics, what an absurdity it is for them to pinch and screw their feet into shoes too small, when all they

have to do is to be handsomely and comfortably shod, and still as to their feet be far below the standard of size with which their foreign sisters step complacently on our shores.

Much has been said regarding the late barefaced way in which bogus, non-bogus, exhausted, ruined, impecunious foreigners have purchased American girls with their bogus or non-bogus, but always impecunious, offers of rank, and the humiliating phase of American girls being willing to transfer themselves for this titular vanity, when it is notorious that in no country has woman, whether as child, girl, or matron, so high a place as in this in chivalric love and respect. But, whereas the girls so disposing of themselves are palpably only "pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw," sufficient credit has not been awarded to their captors for the good taste which they have evinced, their sole motive having been deemed mercenary. But let us look for a moment at the thing in the glass of fashion, by which to judge the mold of form, and see if we have done these foreigners the fullest justice. Be they real or spurious, lords or lordlings, counts or bogus counts, it will be seen upon scrutiny that they have an eye for other things besides the main chance.

The action of these girls has been characterized as outrageous from the point of view of morals. But we shall not be so severe in our thoughts, remembering that, for the most part, in the feminine mind, the mere practice, without the religious theory of matrimony, covers, like charity, a multitude of sins. We characterize it as unwise, from the fact that in America the wife holds the highest position which she has yet attained. We confess, however, that if we were a count or bogus count, or a needy foreigner of any sort, that, as we should not be expected to have any morals, we should be most happy to accept in marriage any rich American girl who is at the same time handsome and all that thousands of American girls are otherwise in delectability, and that is just what these men are doing. One

of them must be very forlorn indeed to demand only money for his rank. He must, as a general rule, have beauty, grace, vivacity, manners, education, or else the money-bags must be very heavy, and perhaps they will not even then suffice to tip the scale. It is only a very dilapidated American old maid who has to pay an inordinately high price for a poor specimen of a count like a barber. So we argue that great injustice has been done to the motives and taste of these foreigners, and impliedly to the charms of the American girls whom they preferably seek. They have a keen appreciation of the personal charms of these girls. With their sublime egotism, they only want the earth, and they get it.

Granting the brightness, vivacity, information, tact, grace, and all other attractive attributes of the girls, back of these, however, there must still be something in their physical characteristics which makes them so attractive to foreigners, for these qualities do not of themselves ever prove most powerful in sexual selection. The main attraction is through that principle. which nature is continually manifesting as operative among human beings, the affinity of opposites. Frederic the Great's regiment of giants left progeny of huge size at Potsdam, but we do not hear that the race has been maintained. If every tall man and tall woman, and similarly of the short of both sexes, should come together by elective affinity in marriage, what would become of the human race as we know it, even within the span of a hundred years? It is the delicacy of the traits of the American woman which attracts the average foreigner. After the whopping big feet and hands of many foreign women, especially of Englishwomen, it is delightful to see the sylph-like delicacy of the sex in America as to their extremities. And the whole person of the American girl partakes of this delicacy of physical traits, and, coupled with mental attributes, represents what foreigners find so attractive in her. Therefore, her reflec