orce a glimmer of reason into the minds of
these women. Then they gave it up, and passed a law making it a
statutory offense, with heavy fines, for any one to "expectorate" on the
sidewalk or anywhere else where the saliva could be swept up by the
trains of the women of nearly all classes who followed the fashion. The
American woman, as I have said, looks askance at the footgear of the
Chinese--high, warm, dry, sanitary, yet revels in creations which cramp
the feet and distort the anatomy. The shoes are made of leather,
inflexible, pointed; and to enable them to deceive the men into the
belief that they have high insteps (a sign of good blood here) the women
wear stilt-like heels, which throw the foot forward and elevate the heel
from two to three inches above the ground.

But all this is but a bagatelle to the fashions in deformity which we
find among nearly all American women. There are throughout the country
numbers of large manufactories which make "corsets"--a peculiar waist
and lung compressor, used by nearly every woman in America. These men
are as dogmatic as the designers of the fashion-plates. They also issue
plates or guides showing new changes, and the women, like sheep, adopt
them. The American woman believes that a narrow waist enhances her
beauty, and the corset-maker works upon the national weakness and builds
creations that put to shame and ridicule the bound feet of the
aristocratic Chinese woman. The corset is a lace and ribbon-decorated
armor, made either of steel ribs or whale-bone, which fits the waist and
clings to the hips. It is laced up, and the degree of tightness depends
upon the will or nerve of the wearer. It compresses the heart and lungs,
and wearing it is a most barbarous custom--a telling argument against
the assumption of high intelligence on the part of the Americans, who,
in this respect, rank with the flat-headed Indians of the northwest
American coast, whose heads I have seen in their medical offices side by
side with a diagram showing the abnormal conditions caused by the
corset.

A year ago the fiat went forth that the American woman must have wide
hips. Presto! there appeared especially devised machinery, advertised in
all the journals, accomplishing the condition for those whom nature had
not well endowed. Now the dressmaker has decided that they must be
narrow-hipped, and half a million dollars in false hips, rubber pads,
and other properties are cast aside. No extravaganza i