The declaration is signed by a great number of eminent men at home and abroad, and its point is to insist that people of the present day dress so hideously that they will not make pictures. A transitional change is recommended, and the Declarers affectionately remind the public that so long as they make Guys of themselves at the instigation of tailors and milliners, portraits have no value except as family memorials, whereas, if we dressed properly, the artists would make us into tableaux which the whole world should admire. All this is perfectly true, but what is to be done? How are we to extricate ourselves from the tyranny of the tailor and the milliner? This the Declarers do not tell us, nor was it to be expected perhaps that they should advise us how to conduct a rebellion. But why do they not tell us how they would like us to dress? Men, for instance. Are they to come out with a choice array of colour, and with a picturesquely cut garb, and that general ampleness and nobleness in treatment of costume, which bespeaks the grand and heroic in the wearer? [Sidenote: _The Briton Abroad_] At this point _Punch_ deviates into absurdity. But the main argument is sound. As a transition, however, to the subject of men's dress, another deliverance serves our purpose even better. _Punch_ loved to criticize and even carp at his countrymen and countrywomen, but he did not easily suffer any infringement of his prerogative. And so, when a correspondent of _The Times_ fell foul of the dowdiness of Englishmen and Englishwomen abroad, he was up in arms at once:-- _The Times_ abuses John Bull, and Madame son Épouse, for going about on their travels got up as Guys--for shocking foreign prejudices, and showing their contempt for foreign opinion, by sporting eccentric shooting-coats, flaming flannel shirts, reckless wide-awakes--and worse still on the ladies' part, by the general shabbiness and ugliness of their travelling toilettes and headgear. Now, making every allowance for the desperate necessities of newspaper writers in the dead season, and admitting that British travellers--male and female--include specimens both of the Guy and the Gorilla, _Mr. Punch_ must put in his protest against any such wholesale indictment as this of his compatriots en voyage. On the contrary he is prepared to maintain, after surveying mankind from Calais to Calatafimi ... that, as a rule, the wearer of the best travelling suit (for stuff, cut, and condition together), the cleanest shirt, the least ragamuffin or ridiculous hat, the soundest and shapeliest foot-covering, is a Briton.