witnessed unless in the artificial environment of the stage or circus, and which were transforming the life of women, root and branch, and through them affecting for the better the manners and ideas of men. The immemorial reign of the Weakervessel and the Dollymops was o’er; crinoline was unheard of, as was its bastard offspring, the hump or dress-spoiler; the chignon displayed not its massive coil; the wasp-waist and the stilt-heel were no longer admired, but were looked upon as horrid survivals of the mediæval torture-chamber; corset-makers had little custom but from the very aged or diseased, the classical Spanish sash supplying the place of stays, where required; the hollow modes of Paris were altogether beginning to find the solid modes of London too strong for them, and had begun to shape their course accordingly: in a word, the old-world fripperies and barbarisms were all drifting away like November leaves before the north-wester. And with the new, free, comfortable, and rational garments, and the vigorous enjoyments to which they gave scope, the tone of girls’ minds became braced, their tastes widened and raised, their interest in public concerns, apart from personalities, aroused; in short, their emancipation from the past completed, and their grasps of the future assured. Superficial thinkers said that the sexes were changing places; but those of deeper understanding saw that the elevation of woman to her proper place would never degrade man below his, which indeed he had never yet filled; they saw that within the area of the Revolution mankind was rising to a higher level, and getting a wider and truer view of the world.
One part only of the revolutionary programme will probably jar upon the feelings of the reader, as it did upon those whose unwelcome duty it was to carry it out. The recognition of women’s dignity made it imperative that personal outrages against it should be put down with no irreso-
