will testify,
whose misery the most expensive doctors have been called
upon to alleviate without avail. And how can a child be well
born unless its parents observe the laws of life bearing
upon the birth and rearing of children? It is impossible. If
a mother will so clothe herself that the vitality which
properly belongs to her baby becomes exhausted and
destroyed, the child is robbed, as a natural consequence,
and perhaps the weakened, puny, distorted, fretful little
creature, who is innocent of the cause of its own
sufferings, will live to become a curse to the world instead
of the blessing that it would have been had rational
conditions been observed before its birth.

* * * * *

Tight corsets grudgingly loosened a quarter of an inch at a
time, heavy skirts, and all the evil conditions we are so
familiar with, are still retained as the months pass,
bringing ever nearer what should be the very happiest hour
of woman's existence--that in which she is to be intrusted
with the keeping, training, and guidance of a new human
soul. Perhaps her baby comes into the world dead or
deformed, perhaps deprived of certain of its faculties; or
it may be that it possesses life and all of its special
senses and organs in such a diminished degree that the whole
of its future becomes a pain rather than a joy, while its
miserable, puny structure remains a lasting reproach to its
parents as long as they live.

[Illustration: VAGARIES OF FASHION. PREVAILING STYLES IN WALKING
COSTUMES DURING THE PAST THIRTY YEARS. (Four images for the years
1860, 1872, 1878, and 1886.)]

I answer not past, but they are assuming other forms. Since 1890
dawned, the evils in some respects have been aggravated; for it must
not be forgotten that the daughters of the present decade have, in
order to be fashionable, compressed beyond all healthful bounds the
flesh of their arms, retarding circulation and inviting pneumonia and
other ills. And in order to look stylish, thousands of women wear
dress waists so tight that no free movement of the upper body is
possible; indeed in numbers of instances ladies are compelled to put
their bonnets on before attempting the painful ord