seen throughout the civilized world, society would experience a distinct shock; immoral, indecent, pernicious, and vulgar would mildly express the sentiment of conventional thought, until the same society had become accustomed to the change. To us at the present time it is difficult to conceive how women of sense and refinement submitted to the swinging-cage paraphernalia of the sixties, or the Grecian bend of a later date. Yet in those days the severely plain skirts of the present would have seemed positively indecent. It has been necessary to dwell on this thought in order to sufficiently remove existing prejudice to enable a fair consideration of the question in its broader aspects. I have also introduced fair examples of prevailing fashions during the past generation and reproductions of Greek, Shakespearian and other simple costumes worn at the present time by the queens of the stage, to show by comparison how infinitely more graceful, beautiful, comfortable, healthful, and by their very elements of comfort and healthfulness, ethically superior, are these costumes to those which conventionalism sanctioned in the sixties, seventies, and eighties. Is there anything immodest, indecent, or suggestive of impropriety in Mary Anderson in the graceful Grecian costume of Parthenia, presented on the preceding page? Of the tens of thousands of people who have witnessed the performances of Madame Modjeska, Miss Anderson, Julia Marlowe, or Margaret Mather in the costumes given in this paper, it is not probable that a perceptible number have seen aught improper or even injuriously suggestive, notwithstanding they are so radically unconventional. Surely no mind accustomed to think broadly and view problems on all sides, and unaccustomed to revel in the sewer of sensualism would see in the attire of these estimable ladies aught but costumes at once graceful, refined, and apparently infinitely more comfortable and healthful than those represented in any of the fashion plates I have reproduced, and which millions of women of good sense have under the stress of conventionalism been compelled to wear. Let us compare Miss Anderson's Grecian costume with the dress of a society belle in the seventies, which required from twenty to thirty yards of material, and when completed and fitted transformed the wearer into a monstrosity with an unsightly hump on the back, and a street cleaner of immense dimensions trailing for several feet in her rear. [Illustration] [Illustration: _From copyrighted photo by Sarony._ MARY ANDERSON AS PARTHENIA.]