These principles are, briefly:

The fitness of dress depends upon the occasion.

The beauty of dress depends upon line and color.

The ethics of dress depends upon quality and the relation of cost to one's means.

In time we may get into the heads of all women, rich and poor, that an open-work stocking and low shoe for winter and street wear are as unfit as they all concede a trailing skirt to be. In time we may even hope to train the eye until it recognizes the difference between a beautiful and a grotesque form, between a flowing and a jagged line. In time we may restore the sense of quality, which our grandmothers certainly had, and which almost every European peasant brings with her to this country.

These principles are teachable things. Let her once grasp them and the vagaries of style will become as distasteful as poor drawing does to one whose eye has learned what is correct, as lying is to one who has cultivated the taste for the truth.

As a method of education, instruction in the principles of dress is admirable for a girl. Through it she can be made to grasp the truth which women so generally suspect to-day; that is, the importance of the common and universal things of life; the fact that all these every-day processes are the expressions of the great underlying truths of life. A girl can be taught, too, through this matter of dress, as directly perhaps as through anything that concerns her, the importance of studying human follies! Follies grow out of powerful human instincts, ineradicable elements of human nature. They would not exist if there were not at the bottom of them some impulse of nature, right and beautiful and essential. The folly of woman's dress lies not in her instinct to make herself beautiful, it lies in her ignorance of the principles of beauty, of the intimate and essential connection between utility and beauty. It lies in the pitiful assumption that she can achieve her end by imitation, that she can be the thing she envies if she look like that thing.

The matter of dress is the more important, because bound up with it is the whole grist of social and economic problems. It is part and parcel of the problem of the cost of living, of woman's wages, of wasteful industries, of the social evil itself. It is a woman's most direct weapon against industrial abuses, her all-powerful weapon as a consumer. At the time of the Lawrence strike, Miss Vida Scudder,

of Wellesley College, is reported to have said in a talk to a group of women citizens in Lawrence:

"I speak for thousands besides myself when I say that I would rather never again wear a thread of woolen than know that my garments had been woven at the cost of such misery as I have seen and known, past the shadow of a doubt, to have existed in this town."

Miss Scudder might have been more emphatic and still have been entirely within the limit of plain obligation; she might have said, "I will never again wear a thread of woolen woven at the cost of such misery as exists in this town."

Women will not be doing their duty, as citizens in this country, until they recognize fully the obligations laid upon them by their control of consumption.

The very heart of the question of the dress is, then, economic and social. It is one of those great every-day matters on which the moral and physical well-being of society rests; one of those matters which, rightly understood, fill the every-day life with big meanings, show it related to every great movement for the betterment of man.

Like all of the great interests in the Business of Being a Woman, it is primarily an individual problem, and every woman who solves it for herself, that is, arrives at what may be called a sound mode of dress, makes a real contribution to society. There is a tendency to overlook the value of the individual solution of the problems of life, and yet the successful individual solution is perhaps the most genuine and fundamental contribution a man or woman can make. The end of living is a life-fair, sound, sweet, complete. The vast machinery of life to which we give so much attention, our governments, and societies, our politics and wrangling, is nothing in itself. It is only a series of contrivances to insure the chance to grow a life. He who proves that he can conquer his conditions, can adjust himself to the machinery in which he finds himself, he is the most genuine of social servants. He realizes the thing for which we talk and scheme, and so proves that our dreams are not vain!

SHIPPING

BY ARCHIE AUSTIN COATES

Here the gray wharf, crawling with jostling men,
Redolent of the barter of the world!

Strange smells of unknown East and alien South,
Hemp that reeks of damp Luzonian cellars,
And hill on hill of bawdy-smelling hides;

Mattings swarming with strange sprawling marks
Seeming a lyric poem of Japan,

Instead of makers' stenciled business signs.
Faint breaths of cinnamon and aloe smells

Mixed with the knife-sharp fragrance of the sea;
Great sacks of beans, like pearls, from Italy,
And logs of teak by Burmese coolies cut.

And by the wharf the great ship silent sleeps
In beauty, as she were some huge sea cat
Stretched in the morning sun to take her ease.
A slow sea dowager of swelling flanks,
Her long voyage done, who waits another day
When, heavy-laden, she sets forth again
To carry barter round the girdled globe.

Here is the meeting-place of all the world-
A nest of phantasies where sleeps Romance
Under the sun of a long still summer morn.