I have referred to a few of the most prominent evils of our present mode of female Dress. Now, let me ask, if our women would dress warmly and securely from wind and wet, yet not in too close confinement, their feet and limbs; if they would shorten their skirts so they would swing clear of wet, mud, filth, and passing obstacles; diminish their number and dimensions, so that their weight would not be burdensome, and suspend them from the shoulders, instead of girting them around the abdominal and spinal regions; would give their chests a free and easy play; would cover their heads, arms, and necks whenever exposed to cold and damp weather or night air, and would always seek to be clothed easily and comfortably, giving always a sufficiently free circulation of air between their dresses and bodies, to carry off the constant exhalations going out from every living body; if they would thus dress, would they not be far more healthy, happy, and useful? Would the roses not return to their cheeks, the full, swelling beauties of woman's strength to their forms? This subject has weighty moral and religious considerations connected with it. Have we any moral right thus to abuse our bodies, thus to commit a snail-working suicide? What matters it, so far as the guilt is concerned, whether we kill ourselves in a minute or a year, a year or an age? We have more suicides among us than we sometimes imagine. The young miss goes out in a cold night, with bare arms and head and neck, and wafer-like slippers on her feet, with her waist engirded in cords and whalebones, and her load of burdensome skirts, and dances in high glee two thirds of the night; then, with a vail on her head and her under-garments not yet dry from the recent perspiration, she goes to her cold chamber and bed, to get a troubled sleep, and awaken in a fever which carries her to her grave. Then round her mutilated body gather her mourning friends to bid it a long farewell and hear her minister talk of the inscrutable ways of God's providence. Call it by what name _you_ will, to _me_ it is suicide. Another, by daily exposures in wet and cold and change of climate in the common woman-dress, takes cold after cold, till a consumption fastens upon her lungs and she slowly passes away. Another circle of mourners weep, and another minister talks of the inscrutable ways of God; but to me it is still another case of suicide. Another passes through the common lot of girlhood, with the common succession of colds and coughs, fevers and pains; in due time marries, with her chest cramped into half its proper dimensions, her lungs small and weak, her female economy all diseased and weakened by the abuses of dress and exposure. At length the period of maternity approaches. Too weak to sustain its labors and burdens, she dies amid them. Friends come weeping again, and the minister condoles them with the sad old story of God's inscrutable ways. But to me it is not inscrutable. It is another case of suicide.