It is probable that the imitation of what is distinctive and fixed in the costume and manners of the higher class preceded by some interval the imitation of the changes we call fashion. How the two are connected does not seem to be quite clear. Did the rulers and those immediately about them, piqued at the adoption of their ways by the vulgar, try to steal a march on imitation by changing their customs? To judge from what takes place to-day, one would answer “yes”. I am told that ladies strongly object to go on wearing a fashionable hat as soon as it becomes generally worn by factory girls, or other inferior group. However this be, it seems certain that the “leaders of society,” while they reserve for special ceremonial occasions a distinctive dress, mode of speech and the rest, choose to alter these from time to time for other purposes. Such alterations may be the result of the caprices of a “leader,” guided by some inventor, or they may take the form of an assimilation of a foreign mode. Lastly, the leaders may include others besides the Court people: the universities are accredited with the origination of many of the pretty bits of slang, the use of {275} which is supposed to betoken a certain social altitude and “up-to-dateness”. In the midst of these changes of fashion something of custom may be seen still to persist. Taking the dress of woman to-day, we note that in spite of experiments like those of the Bloomers, skirts continue to be a permanent feature in female attire. Fashions in respect of width, and even of length, may come and go, but the skirt as skirt seems to go on for ever. Even when the impulse to adopt the dress and behaviour of the upper class was allowed a certain play, it was probably long before it acted on all ranks. Each rank, whilst keen in its imitation of the ways of the class above it, would naturally resist any further descent of the imitative movement.