The weight of skirts and the constraints of corsets are still properly made the theme of indignant declamation.  Yet let us be just.  It is impossible to make costume the prime culprit, when we recall what robust generations have been reared beneath the same formidable panoply.  For instance, it seems as if no woman could habitually walk uninjured with a weight of twelve pounds of skirts suspended at her hips,—­Dr. Coale is responsible for the statistics,—­and as if salvation must therefore lie in shoulder-straps.  Yet the practice cannot be sheer suicide, when the Dutch peasant-girl plods bloomingly through her daily duties beneath a dozen successive involucres of flannel.  So in regard to tight lacing, no one can doubt its ill effects, since even a man’s loose garments are known to diminish by one-fourth his capacity for respiration.  Yet inspect in the shop-windows (where the facts of female costume are obtruded too pertinaciously for the public to remain in ignorance) the light and flexible corsets of these days, and then contemplate at Pilgrim Hall in Plymouth the stout buckram stays that once incased the stouter heart of Alice Bradford.  Those, again, were to those of a still earlier epoch as leather to chain-armor.  The Countess of Buchan was confined in an iron cage for life for assisting to crown Robert the Bruce, but her only loss by the incarceration was that her iron cage ceased to be portable.

Passing from costume, it must be noticed that there are many physical evils which the American woman shares with the other sex, but which bear with far greater severity on her finer organization.  There is improper food, for instance.  The fried or salted meat, the heavy bread, the perennial pork, the disastrous mince-pies of our farmers’ houses are sometimes pardoned by Nature to the men of the family, in consideration of twelve or more hours of out-door labor.  For the more sedentary and delicate daughter there is no such atonement, and she vibrates between dyspepsia and starvation.  The only locality in America where I have ever found the farming population living habitually on wholesome diet is the Quaker region in Eastern Pennsylvania, and I have never seen anywhere else such a healthy race of women.  Yet here, again, it is not safe to be hasty, or to lay the whole responsibility upon the kitchen, when we recall the astounding diet on which healthy Englishwomen subsisted two centuries ago.  Consider, for instance, the housekeeping of the Duke of Northumberland.  “My lord and lady have for breakfast, at seven o’clock, a quart of beer, as much wine, two pieces of salt fish, six red herring, four white ones, and a dish of sprats.”  Digestive resources which could, entertain this bill of fare might safely be trusted to travel in America.