myriad paragraphs, in
fashion-pages, and do not spare even the august columns of the most
dignified papers. This preoccupation does not exist among men. We have
had our dandies and we still have our "nuts" and dudes; but it never
served a man very well to be a dandy or a beau, and most of us to-day
suspect that if the "nut" were broken, he would be found to contain no
kernel.

Men have escaped the fashions and therewith they have spared themselves
much loss of energy and money. For it is not only the fashions that
matter: it is the cost of women's clothes, the intrinsic cost; it is
their continual changes for no reason, changes which sometimes produce,
and sometimes destroy, beauty; sometimes promote comfort, and often
cause torture. But always by their drafts upon its wealth, women lead
humanity nearer to poverty, envy, discontent, frivolity, starvation,
prostitution,--to general social degradation. Nothing can mitigate these
evils until woman is induced to view clothing as does the modern man,
until, namely, she decides to wear a uniform.

2

The costliness of women's clothes would not be so serious if the
fashions did not change at so bewildering a speed. We have come to a
point where women have not time to wear out their clothes, flimsy though
they be; where we ought to welcome the adulteration of silk and wool;
where we ought to hope that every material may get shoddier and more
worthless, so that the new model may have a chance to justify its short
life by the badness of the stuff. To-day women will quite openly say, "I
won't buy that. I couldn't wear it out." They actually _want_ to wear
out their clothes! The causes of this are obvious enough. We are told
that there are "rings" in Paris, London, and Vienna which decree every
few months that the clothes of yesterday have become a social stigma;
this is true, but much truer is the view that women are in the grasp of
a new hysteria; that, lacking the old occupations of brewing, baking,
child-rearing, spinning, they are desperately looking for something to
do. They have found it: they are undoing the social system.

It was not always so. It is true that all through history, even in
biblical times, moralists and preachers inveighed against the gewgaws
that woman loves. They cried out before they were hurt; if he were alive
to-day, Bossuet might, for the first time, fail to find words.

To the old curse of cost we have added change, as any student of costume
w