us how, when he was
shipwrecked on a remote part of the coast, and he and the rest of the
passengers were starving on cockles and limpets, there was among them a
slave girl out of the far East, who had a pinched wasp-waist, such as you
may see on the old Hindoo sculptures, and such as you may see in any
street in a British town. And when the Greek ladies of the neighbourhood
found her out, they sent for her from house to house, to behold, with
astonishment and laughter, this new and prodigious waist, with which it
seemed to them it was impossible for a human being to breathe or live;
and they petted the poor girl, and fed her, as they might a dwarf or a
giantess, till she got quite fat and comfortable, while her owners had
not enough to eat. So strange and ridiculous seemed our present fashion
to the descendants of those who, centuries before, had imagined, because
they had seen living and moving, those glorious statues which we pretend
to admire, but refuse to imitate.

It seems to me that a few centuries hence, when mankind has learnt to
fear God more, and therefore to obey more strictly those laws of nature
and of science which are the will of God--it seems to me, I say, that in
those days the present fashion of tight lacing will be looked back upon
as a contemptible and barbarous superstition, denoting a very low level
of civilisation in the peoples which have practised it. That for
generations past women should have been in the habit--not to please men,
who do not care about the matter as a point of beauty--but simply to vie
with each other in obedience to something called fashion--that they
should, I say, have been in the habit of deliberately crushing that part
of the body which should be specially left free, contracting and
displacing their lungs, their heart, and all the most vital and important
organs, and entailing thereby disease, not only on themselves but on
their children after them; that for forty years past physicians should
have been telling them of the folly of what they have been doing: and
that they should as yet, in the great majority of cases, not only turn a
deaf ear to all warnings, but actually deny the offence, of which one
glance of the physician or the sculptor, who know what shape the human
body ought to be, brings them in guilty: this, I say, is an instance
of--what shall I call it?--which deserves at once the lash, not merely of
the satirist, but of any theologian who really believes t