For the Bloomer costume was nothing else but a travesty of male attire. Aggressiveness is inseparable, it would seem, from all new ideas, and the minor prophets of Bloomerism were aggressive enough, in all conscience. They were not content with wearing the breeches in the literal sense: they sought to convert all womankind to their faith by the writing of pamphlets and the making of speeches on public platforms. Mrs. Ann Bloomer was their fount of inspiration. She it was who introduced the craze to America in 1849. Two years later it had crossed the herring-pond, and that _Annus Mirabilis_, the year of the Great Exhibition, witnessed a few of its enthusiasts--beldams in breeches--clad in this hybrid garb, walking in London streets. But women refused to be converted in any large numbers, and only a few more than usually impudent females went so far as to back their views by wearing the badges of the cult in public. But although so few Englishwomen were converted to the new dress, and though fewer still had the courage to wear it, the Bloomer agitation was largely noticed in the papers and by the satirists of the time. It was noticed, indeed, in a manner entirely disproportioned to its real import, and the humorous papers, the ballad-mongers, and innumerable private witlings, had their fling at the follies of these early dress-reformers. The Bloomers--unlovely name!--held meetings in London, attended, it must be owned, by crowds of ribald unbelievers; and they even went to the length of holding a ‘Bloomer Ball,’ a grotesque idea hailed with delight by a roaring crowd which assembled ‘after the ball,’ and showed its prejudices by hooting the ridiculous women who had come attired in jackets and trousers like those of the Turk. No Turk, indeed, so unspeakable as they. But the crowd did not stop at this point. They had brought dead cats, decayed cabbages, rotten eggs, and all imaginable articles of offence with which to point their wit, and they used them freely, not only upon the women, but also upon the men who accompanied them. For discrimination was not easy between the sexes in the badly lit streets, when both wore breeches, and at a time when men went generally clean-shaven; and so the rightfully breeched were as despitefully used as the usurpers of man’s distinctive dress.