66

tention, however, to be present at the mill and challenge the winner. He will doubtless do so; but his blatant defi will never result in a fight,—not if he sees the other fellow first. Corbett has acquired a bad habit of filtering his lungpower through the crown of his chapeau. When requested to meet Fitz under a guarantee that it would be а go," he "retired from the ring; but when the Australian was safely side-tracked he crawled out of his hole and withdrew his withdrawal. Corbett may be a great Gladiator, but he would have to go up against a buzzsaw to convince me that his liver is not a perfect blonde. I am no pugilistic expert-it is all I can do to keep tab on the "sporty preachers who are continually breaking into the penitentiary; but I'll wager a gallon o' pure spring water that when Corbett enters the ring" on the level" with the winner of the Maher-Fitzsimmons contest, or does any more fighting except at long range with his mouth, pigs will fly and Mexican dogs wear feathers. He is a pugilistic hasbeen, a vocal back-number who does not yet realize that he is dead.

In the beginning" the earth was without form and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep." That is the condition of our economic world to-day. We are in the vortex of political chaos, aggravated by some forty million Babelian blatherskites, whose leathery lungs make confusion worse confounded. The Democratic ship found the pie-counter a Roncador Reef and went to pieces, while the G.O.P. hasn't the ghost of an idea where it is "at" or whither it is drifting. Only the Prohibition cranks, the female suffrage shriekers and a few whiskered children hovering on the Ultima Thule of Populism, are cock-sure of anything, and they don't count. There's a very large hen on, but whether she will bring forth a brood of gos

lings and add to the bewildering gabble, or a basket of vipers to still further poison the body politic is a riddle I cannot read. Congress can do nothing but add to the uproar, while the President feeds bonds by the hundred million to his Wall Street menagerie, or takes refuge from the rising tide of public discontent behind the frazzled coat-tails of James Monroe. The commerce and industries of this country are being drowned in the great sea of political gab. The Nation is dangerously near the demnition bow-wows, but is not yet past redemption. Let it give its jaw-bone a rest for just one day that its think-tank may do its duty. What is needed is more silent brain-work and less activity on the part of the big bazoo. Let the "able editors" refrain from re-threshing old economic straw, and the political reformers give us a rest for just four-andtwenty hours. Let Barney Gibbs turn the stop-cock on his eternal flow of small talk, Rufus Hardy apply the soft pedal and Waco's bob-tailed "Warwick " neglect to chase himself all over McLennan county, tearfully petitioning for a type-written "interview" anent the situation. This is an heroic prescription I know; but desperate diseases require radical remedies. If the American people are permitted to go out behind the barn and quietly think the matter over; if they can get but one day's surcease from the wild yodel of the professional gabsters, order will be evolved from chaos, the Kilkenny cat-fight transformed into a well-ordered campaign.

MANKIND'S MOCK-MODESTY.

NAKEDNESS OUR NATURAL STATE.

Ir a woman were to walk forth into the streets stark naked, what a sensation she would thereby create! The appearance of a second sun in the heavens would scarce cause such consternation; a circus parade or military pageant were not so potent to draw the world to its front windows! With what haste the police would hustle her out of sight, and what a powerful plea of insanity her attorney would have to put up to save her from prison!

The public's "modesty " would receive a shock from which it would be full nine days recovering. A curious thing, this modesty of the public, and well worth study. How did it come by it? Where and when did it learn that the mortal image of God is a thing to be ashamed of,-a veritable gorgon, upon which to gaze without certain preparatory rites of a thaumaturgic character, were to be turned, if not into stone, at least into foolish blockheads or grinning apes; that it must be religiously hidden; swathed in the skins of beasts, the entrails of worms, thatched over with bark or straw.

There is a tradition that after Adam and Eve ate of the Tree of Knowledge they knew more than the good God had intended, and at once became ashamed of their nakedness. That is what appears to be the matter with the public,-it knows too much; knows that it is a sin and a shame for man or woman to remain in that condition in which their Maker sent them into the world; that they must busy themselves improving his plan.

The modesty of which we make so much, is merely a fungus of stale custom; nothing more. For the sake of ornament, man began to clothe himself, and, as in so

many other instances, luxury became necessity. That man who has never known shoes needs none; nature provides him with adequate protection. Man is by nature a naked animal and may properly remain in that state if he sees fit, without doing violence to aught more sacred than foolish custom.

66

Let the anti-sumptuary legislation advocates think of this and proceed to pour out the vials of their wrath upon laws that compel us to wear clothes as an unwarranted interference with personal liberty!" Surely the Decalogue prescribes man's duties, but does not so much as hint at his inability to discharge each and all of them in puris naturalibus!

When the clothes-wearing habit had become general, man was expected to appear in public in a covering of some sort, just as he is now expected to wear a hat on the street or a coat at the theater. Clothing still retains its primal as its chief characteristic, that of ornamentation, and it were well nigh as great an offense to society to appear in garments of obsolete cut as in none at all.

Curious freaks, this so-called "divine modesty ". generated by the tailor's goose-sometimes manifests. In Mexico a woman thinks herself irretrievably disgraced should she, by some accident, find herself at a great gathering in a "state of nature"; but does not hesitate to lay aside her last stitch of clothing and take a bath where the whole world may gaze at her, if it feel disposed. In Turkey a woman considers herself dishonored if a stranger sees her face, to prevent which she will, if need be, cover it with her only garment. Even our American women-some of them at least-will expose their bosoms in the ballroom and their limbs at the seashore. Young men and modest maidens will wander together through

galleries of nude art without shame; yet if one start a suspender button he is in agony, if the other's garter come unfastened she must hunt some retired nook and readjust it. In some of our cities the portrait in tights may not be displayed in public, yet a female rope-walker may perambulate back and forth across the principal street in a wardrobe that might be crammed into a collarbox.

No; I do not suggest that we lay aside all our clothing -return, without so much as educational preparation, to a "state of nature." Such sudden and sweeping "reform" might prove embarrassing after so many ages of artificiality and mock modesty—especially in so erratic a climate; but it is certainly possible to purify public sentiment somewhat, and, perhaps, make the clothes-wearing custom the slave of mankind instead of its master.

But while that portion of the world which has contracted the clothes-wearing habit never expects to entirely relinquish it, not even in the balmy airs and select society of the celestial Paradise, if the angelic portrait-painters are to be trusted, "dress reform" is an ever burning question.

What man has not had somewhat to say anent the follies and foibles of feminine fashion; the vanity of woman, and so forth? It has become an article in our social creed that woman-the weaker vessel-needs our incessant supervision that she meet not with the fate of Narcissus, or ruin her constitution by a system of dress calculated to attract the gentleman on the Pale Horse, as well as the ordinary bicycle biped. In fact, the female constitution gives us almost as much anxiety as the federal; feminine follies far more worry than our own shortcomings.