exercise thrift in
clothing.

But, beside this thrift in clothing, I am not alone, I believe, in
wishing for some thrift in the energy which produces it. Labour
misapplied, you will agree, is labour wasted; and as dress, I presume, is
intended to adorn the person of the wearer, the making a dress which only
disfigures her may be considered as a plain case of waste. It would be
impertinent in me to go into any details: but it is impossible to walk
about the streets now without passing young people who must be under a
deep delusion as to the success of their own toilette. Instead of
graceful and noble simplicity of form, instead of combinations of colour
at once rich and delicate, because in accordance with the chromatic laws
of nature, one meets with phenomena more and more painful to the eye, and
startling to common sense, till one would be hardly more astonished, and
certainly hardly more shocked, if in a year or two one should pass some
one going about like a Chinese lady, with pinched feet, or like a savage
of the Amazons, with a wooden bung through her lower lip. It is easy to
complain of these monstrosities: but impossible to cure them, it seems to
me, without an education of the taste, an education in those laws of
nature which produce beauty in form and beauty in colour. For that the
cause of these failures lies in want of education is patent. They are
most common in--I had almost said they are confined to--those classes of
well-to-do persons who are the least educated; who have no standard of
taste of their own; and who do not acquire any from cultivated friends
and relations: who, in consequence, dress themselves blindly according to
what they conceive to be the Paris fashions, conveyed at third-hand
through an equally uneducated dressmaker; in innocent ignorance of the
fact--for fact I believe it to be--that Paris fashions are invented now
not in the least for the sake of beauty, but for the sake of producing,
through variety, increased expenditure, and thereby increased employment;
according to the strange system which now prevails in France of
compelling, if not prosperity, at least the signs of it; and like
schoolboys before a holiday, nailing up the head of the weather glass to
insure fine weather.

Let British ladies educate themselves in those laws of beauty which are
as eternal as any other of nature's laws; which may be seen fulfilled, as
Mr. Ruskin tells us, so eloquently in every flower and e