In this connection, also, it is worth noting that Stanley Hall, in a report based on returns from nearly a thousand persons, mostly teachers, ("The Early Sense of Self,” American Journal of Psychology, 1898, p. 366), finds that of the three functions of clothes—­protection, ornament, and Lotzean “self-feeling”—­the second is by far the most conspicuous in childhood.  The attitude of children is testimony to the primitive attitude toward clothing.

It cannot, however, be said that the use of clothing for the sake of showing the natural forms of the body has everywhere been developed.  In Japan, where nakedness is accepted without shame, clothes are worn to cover and conceal, and not to reveal, the body.  It is so, also, in China.  A distinguished Chinese gentleman, who had long resided in Europe, once told Baelz that he had gradually learnt to grasp the European point of view, but that it would be impossible to persuade his fellow-countrymen that a woman who used her clothes to show off her figure could possibly possess the least trace of modesty. (Baelz, Zeitschrift fuer Ethnologie, 1901, Heft 2, p. 179.)

The great artistic elaboration often displayed by articles of ornament or clothing, even when very small, and the fact—­as shown by Karl von den Steinen regarding the Brazilian uluri—­that they may serve as common motives in general decoration, sufficiently prove that such objects attract rather than avoid attention.  And while there is an invincible repugnance among some peoples to remove these articles, such repugnance being often strongest when the adornment is most minute, others have no such repugnance or are quite indifferent whether or not their aprons are accurately adjusted.  The mere presence or possession of the article gives the required sense of self-respect, of human dignity, of sexual desirability.  Thus it is that to unclothe a person, is to humiliate him; this was so even in Homeric times, for we may recall the threat of Ulysses to strip Thyestes.[52]

When clothing is once established, another element, this time a social-economic element, often comes in to emphasize its importance and increase the anatomical modesty of women.  I mean the growth of the conception of women as property.  Waitz, followed by Schurtz and Letourneau, has insisted that the jealousy of husbands is the primary origin of clothing, and, indirectly, of modesty.  Diderot in the eighteenth century had already given clear expression to the same view.  It is undoubtedly true that only married women are among some peoples clothed, the unmarried women, though full grown, remaining naked.  In many parts of the world, also, as Mantegazza and others have shown, where the men are naked and the women covered, clothing is regarded as a sort of disgrace, and men can only with difficulty be persuaded to adopt it.  Before marriage a woman was often free, and not bound to chastity, and at the same time was often naked; after