It is a curious reflection that whilst all the serious acts and surroundings of civilised life have been rendered amenable to the law, whilst the very instincts inherent in the nature of mankind have been dominated and regulated by authority, utter failure has attended the persistent efforts of rulers to cope with the trivial follies of fashion, or to limit the vanity and extravagance of personal adornment. For long ages men, and particularly women, have insisted upon making themselves absurd and uncomfortable, at great cost and in an infinite variety of ways, in obedience to dictates or impulses springing from nobody knows where, and have only consented to forego each succeeding caprice when the taste for it has worn itself out and has given place to another, perhaps still more preposterous than its predecessor. It has been from no fault of the rulers that they have {208} been beaten in their fight with fashion, for they have tried their hardest for centuries. Our Plantagenet and Tudor sovereigns made many attempts to regulate the dress and adornment of their subjects, but the motive which mainly prompted them was the desire to differentiate the classes and prevent the humbler citizens from emulating, in appearance at least, their social superiors. In a state of society which depended upon the subjection of the majority by the privileged classes, this motive was perfectly reasonable; as was also the alternative one of protecting a particular national industry, which, in Tudor times especially, often furnished a reason for the imposition of sumptuary enactments; but both of these motives, from their very nature, were necessarily more or less ephemeral and artificial, because, on the one hand, the continual social development, the growing wealth of the traders and the emancipation of the labourers made the classes interdependent; and, on the other, the extended seaboard of England and the maritime enterprise of the inhabitants made the protection of a particular industry by prohibiting foreign competition impossible for any great length of time. The attempted interference, therefore, of English sovereigns with the dress of their lieges was intermittent and spasmodic, and was, at a comparatively early period, admitted to be useless.