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Sanitary and Social Lectures, etc by Charles Kingsley
page 60 of 220 (27%)
patent. They are most common in--I had almost said they are
confined to--those classes of well-to-do persons who are the least
educated; who have no standard of taste of their own; and who do
not acquire any from cultivated friends and relations: who, in
consequence, dress themselves blindly according to what they
conceive to be the Paris fashions, conveyed at third-hand through
an equally uneducated dressmaker; in innocent ignorance of the
fact--for fact I believe it to be--that Paris fashions are
invented now not in the least for the sake of beauty, but for the
sake of producing, through variety, increased expenditure, and
thereby increased employment; according to the strange system
which now prevails in France of compelling, if not prosperity, at
least the signs of it; and like schoolboys before a holiday,
nailing up the head of the weather-glass to insure fine weather.

Let British ladies educate themselves in those laws of beauty
which are as eternal as any other of nature's laws; which may be
seen fulfilled, as Mr. Ruskin tells us, so eloquently in every
flower and every leaf, in every sweeping down and rippling wave;
and they will be able to invent graceful and economical dresses
for themselves, without importing tawdry and expensive ugliness
from France.

Let me now go a step farther, and ask you to consider this: There
are in England now a vast number, and an increasing number, of
young women who, from various circumstances which we all know,
must in after life be either the mistresses of their own fortunes,
or the earners of their own bread. And, to do that wisely and
well, they must be more or less women of business, and to be women
of business they must know something of the meaning of the words
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