ke every other human instinct, has its
distortions. It is in the failure to see the relative importance of
things, to keep the proportions, that human beings lose control of
their endowment. Give an instinct an inch, and it invariably takes its
ell! The instinct for clothes, from which we have learned so much in
our climb from savagery, has more than once had the upper hand of us.
So dangerous to the prosperity and the seriousness of peoples has its
tyranny been, that laws have again and again been passed to check it;
punishments have been devised to frighten off men from indulging it;
whole classes have been put into dull and formless costumes to crucify
it.

Man gradually and in the main has conquered his passion for ornament.
To-day, in the leading nations of the world, he clothes rather than
arrays himself. Woman has not harnessed the instinct. She still allows
it to drive her, and often to her own grave prejudice. Even in a
democracy like our own, woman has not been able to master this problem
of clothes. In fact, democracy has complicated the problem seriously.

Under the old regime costumes had been worked out for the various
classes. They were adapted both to the purse and to the pursuit. They
were fitting--that is, silk was not worn in huts or homespun in
palaces; slippers were for carriages and _sabots_ for streets. The
garments of a class were founded on good sound principles on the
whole--but they marked the class. Democracy sought to destroy outward
distinctions. The proscribed costumes went into the pot with
proscribed positions. Under democracy we can cook in silk petticoats
and go to the White House in a cap and apron, if we will. And we often
will, that being a way to advertise our equality!

Class costumes destroyed, the principles back of them, that is,
fitness, quality, responsibility, were forgotten. The old instinct for
ornament broke loose. Its tyranny was strengthened by the eternal
desire of the individual to prove himself superior to his fellows.
Wealth is the generally accepted standard of measurement of value in
this country to-day, and there is no way in which the average man can
show wealth so clearly as in encouraging his women folk to array
themselves. Thus we have the anomaly in a democracy of a primitive
instinct let loose, and the adoption of discarded aristocratic devices
for proving you are better than your neighbor, at least in the one
revered particular of having more money to s