In nations that cover the body for another purpose than decoration and protection from the weather, disputes as to how much of it, and in what circumstances, should be covered are inevitable and uncomposable. Alike in nature and in art, the question of the nude will be always demanding adjustment and be never adjusted. This wrangle we have always with us as a penalty for the prudery of concealment, creating and suggesting the prurience of exposure. Offended Nature hides her lash In the purple-black of a dyed mustache, and the lash lurks in every fold of the clothing of her choice. In ancient Greece the disgraceful squabble was unknown; it did not occur to the great-hearted, broad-brained and wholesome people of that blessed land that any of the handiwork of the gods was ignoble. Nor are the modern Japanese vexed with “the question of the nude”; save where their admirable civilization has suffered the polluting touch of ours they have not learned the infamy of sex. Among the blessings in store for them are their conversion to decorous lubricity and instruction in the nice conduct of a clouded mind. I am not myself prepared to utter judgment in all these matters. I do not know the precise degree of propriety in a lady’s “full dress” at dinner, nor exactly how suggestive it is at breakfast. I can not say with accuracy when and where and why a costume is immodest that is modest in a mixed crowd at the sea beach. But this I know, despite all the ingenious fictions, subtleties and sophistries wherewith naked Nonsense is accustomed to drape herself as with a skeletonized fig-leaf: that no man nor any woman addicted to play-going, society entertainments and surf-bathing has the right to censure any costume that is tolerated by the police. As to the “bloomers,” they have not a suggestion of indelicacy, and of the person who professes to see it in them I, for one, am fatigued and indisposed; and I confidently affirm the advantage to the commonwealth of binding him to his own back and removing the organ that he is an idiot with.