Not content with warping our national character by slavish veneration of this abstraction, we have corrupted decent barbarians by inoculating them with our miserable disease of Respectability. We have clothed the innocent nude, and taught them shame, and in making them respectable we have annihilated their pristine morality, and substituted Western cant and indecency. Fortunately, however, the savage is too wholesome an animal to become respectable without protest, and in most instances, we have failed to convince him of the benefits of insanitary clothing as badges of respectability and tokens of civilisation. Quoting from Dalton, Reclus, in his "Primitive Folk," says of the Kolarian women:-- "These savage women win hearts by their frank and open manners and naïve gaiety. Mixing freely from earliest childhood with the other sex, they have none of the prudery of Hindoos and Mussulmans, who have been brought up in strict seclusion; a prudery which at moments gives place to unclean talk, and is full of suggested obscenities. On the other hand, the modest grace of young Hos or Moonah maidens and the little girls of the Larkas is a subject of praise. Patience! Civilisation will soon cure them of this barbarism, will correct their ignorance." It is a wretched reflection that these delightful women will one day be as respectable as the female natives of Stoke Newington. A lady novelist writes that every English woman is a savage at heart. Does she not pay her sisters too high a compliment? The enforced clothing of the Curumbas women of Malabar, at the instigation of the "respectable English ladies" at Calcutta, is one of the pitiful examples of the indecency of thought born of our ideas of respectability. These damsels of the Curumbas tribe wore aprons of leaves suspended from a bead waistband. Such garb was not only suited to the climate, but it was charming as well as healthy. The Calcutta British Matrons thought such wear abominable. How could these women be respectable in such scanty drapery? Accordingly, by direction of Bumble, four corporals and two sergeants of infantry were told off with a company to drag the leaf aprons from the front and behind, and to put the women into petticoats. The greenery was then burned in a bonfire. What a glorious triumph of Respectability! How thoroughly British matronly and indelicate in conception was this compulsory clothing of innocent modest women by Tommy Atkins and his "pals." Is there the least need to dwell upon the contrast of decency that these Curumbas women present to the "respectable English ladies" of Calcutta?