gated curse to the living and a legacy of misery and
disease to posterity. And this cruel deforming of the most beautiful
of God's creations was said to be beautiful simply because fashion
willed it. Nor was this all; enormous bustles and skirts of prodigious
dimension have borne their weight largely upon that part of her body
which above all else should be absolutely free from pressure. By this
means the most sensitive organs have been ruthlessly subjected to down
pressing weights which for exquisite torture and for the absolute
certainty of the long train of agony that must result, rival the
heartless ingenuity of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages. Beyond this
generation of debilitated and invalided mothers, rises a countless
posterity robbed of its birthright of health while yet unborn.[4] A
possible genius deformed and dwarfed by the weight of a fashionable
dress; a brain which might have been brilliant rendered idiotic by the
constant pressure of a corset, and the wearisome weight of a "stylish"
dress pressing about the hips; a child whose natural capacity might
have carried him to the seat of a Webster or into the laboratory of an
Edison, condemned to drag a weakly, diseased, or deformed body through
life, with mind ever chained to the flesh, through the heartless
imposition which fashion imposed on his mother! What thought can be
more appalling to a conscientious woman? Yet until a revolution is
accomplished and a reign of reason and common sense inaugurated, this
crime against the unborn will continue. But some argue the days of
these extremes are past.

[4] In discussing the solemn duty mothers owe to their
offspring, Mrs. Annie Jenness Miller sensibly observes:--

Are women ignorant of the mischief they do to their
offspring, or are they indifferent to consequences? Has the
true maternal love become extinct, in this age of advanced
civilization, that women ignore all the laws of nature while
anticipating the glory of motherhood? We know not; yet we
often see what causes a thrill of pity in our soul for the
future of the child yet unborn: a mother laced within stiff
bones and steel, while the very instincts of being cry out
against the sin of it. Surely every child has a right to be
well born! Wealth may be a grand inheritance, but health is
a better one, as any poor suffering creature