The first essential in a woman's dress should be that _the beauty of it must be a beauty that shall always be beautiful_. I do not deprecate fashion--on the contrary, change is in itself pleasant to the eyes. But it must be a change from one loveliness to another. To see a rose is always an exquisite delight; so it is to see a lily. But we are not called upon to decide once for all which we prefer, and if we choose the rose to kill all the lilies. Thus it should be with dress: change is desirable, but it must be on the understanding that no ugly thing shall be tolerated for the sake of fashion. That is, I think, the first great principle; and attention to it would rid us for ever of the danger of the recurrence of those monstrosities that have brought the very name of "fashion" into contempt. There have been vagaries in dress to which our countrywomen have submitted, not because they had an imperfect perception of what is really beautiful and took the false for true, but because, in obedience to the inexorable laws of fashion, they accepted regretfully what they knew to be ugly. I hope the time will never come again when we may be tempted to lay a finger on her ladyship's hoops, and ask, as the little maid did, "Pray, madam, is that all yourself?" The leaders of fashion in Europe see clearly enough that to mutilate a woman's foot, as the Chinese do, is a barbarous custom; but they do not perceive that to make European ladies walk painfully on stilts and tiptoe is barbarism of the same kind. But the truth is that every attempt to modify the human form is an act of savagery, and any form of dress that simulates a modification, whether worn in Pekin or in Paris, or in London, is a savage dress, and carries with it the additional shame of being a sham. Let us be content with women as God made them. Let them be dressed, not altered. In a word, _no dress can be really beautiful that suggests a personal deformity_. Secondarily to this reverence for the human form should be fair treatment of the fabric of which the dress is made. Velvet, silk, linen,--each has its own natural way of falling into folds; and the shape that a dress should take should be the natural result of the folding of the material, and not the result of an artificial construction. This principle may also be expressed in the simple form of a negative. _No dress can be really beautiful that suggests the carrying about of a machine._