The story of the bloomer is piquant.  It was launched and worn.  It became the subject of platform oratory and had its organ.  Why is it not worn to-day?  No woman who has ever masqueraded in man’s dress or donned it for climbing will ever forget the freedom of it.  Yet the only woman in the Christian world who ever wore it at once naturally and with that touch of coquetry which is necessary to carry it off, as far as this writer’s personal observation goes, was Madame Dieulafoy, and Madame Dieulafoy was protected by the French government and an exclusive circle.

Bloomers proved too much for even the courage of dear Miss Anthony.  For two years she wore them, and then with tears and lamentations resigned them.  In that resignation Miss Anthony paid tribute, unconsciously no doubt, to something deeper than she ever grasped in the woman question.  Her valiant soul met its master in her own nature, but she did not recognize it.  She abandoned her convenient and becoming costume because of prejudice, she said.  What other prejudice ever dismayed her!  She thrived on fighting them; she met her woman’s soul, and did not know it!

But from the experiments and blunders and travail of some of these noble and early militants over the dress question, has come, as I have said, our present useful, and probably permanent type of street suit.  In this particular the American woman has achieved a genuine democratization of her clothes.  The experience of the last two years—­fashion’s open attempt to make the walking suit useless by tightening the skirts, and bizarre by elaborate decorations, has in the main failed.  Here, then, is a standard established, and established on one of the great principles of sensible clothing, and that is fitness.  It shows that the true attack on the tyranny and corruption of clothes lies in the establishment of principles.

These principles are, briefly:—­

The fitness of dress depends upon the occasion.

The beauty of dress depends upon line and color.

The ethics of dress depends upon quality and the relation of cost to one’s means.

In time we may get into the heads of all women, rich and poor, that an open-work stocking and low shoe for winter street wear are as unfit as they all concede a trailing skirt to be.  In time we may even hope to train the eye until it recognizes the difference between a beautiful and a grotesque form, between a flowing and a jagged line.  In time we may restore the sense of quality, which our grandmothers certainly had, and which almost every European peasant brings with her to this country.

These principles are teachable things.  Let her once grasp them and the vagaries of style will become as distasteful as poor drawing does to one whose eye has learned what is correct, as lying is to one who has cultivated the taste for the truth.