was among them a slave girl out of the far East, who had a pinched
wasp-waist, such as you may see on the old Hindoo sculptures, and
such as you may see in any street in a British town. And when the
Greek ladies of the neighbourhood found her out, they sent for her
from house to house, to behold, with astonishment and laughter,
this new and prodigious, waist, with which it seemed to them it
was impossible for a human being to breathe or live; and they
petted the poor girl, and fed her, as they might a dwarf or a
giantess, till she got quite fat and comfortable, while her owners
had not enough to eat. So strange and ridiculous seemed our
present fashion to the descendants of those who, centuries before,
had imagined, because they had seen living and moving, those
glorious statues which we pretend to admire, but refuse to
imitate.

It seems to me that a few centuries hence, when mankind has learnt
to fear God more, and therefore to obey more strictly those laws
of nature and of science which are the will of God--it seems to
me, I say, that in those days the present fashion of tight lacing
will be looked back upon as a contemptible and barbarous
superstition, denoting a very low level of civilisation in the
peoples which have practised it. That for generations past women
should have been in the habit--not to please men, who do not care
about the matter as a point of beauty--but simply to vie with each
other in obedience to something called fashion--that they should,
I say, have been in the habit of deliberately crushing that part
of the body which should be specially left free, contracting and
displacing their lungs, their heart, and all the most vital and
important organs, and entailing thereby disease, not only on
themselves but on their children after them; that for forty years