Morning journal and courier., 1888-01-07
PHILOSOPHY OF TIGHT-LACHNG

Why Women Compress Themselves From the Saturday Review.1
 An adventurous lady-we say adventurous
 because we do not see her name among the qualified medical sisterhood-lectured not long ago on the i'll effects and discomfort oi tight-lacing, and was reported to have spec ially emphasized the ease and comfort which resulted from it's abandonment. To this homely argument a eontemporary-somew hastily we think-replied that it was not fol lovely woman to consider her ease, but, at some inconvenience, to convert herself into thing of beauty and become at any rate a temporary joy, if not a joy forever. Now this is a very dangerous concession to make, if indeed it was made in all seriousness, as it is just the argument which tight-lacers-if there is single woman in the whole world who owns that she herself is one of them advance in defence of the custom of, let us say, wearing cersets, and is the point in dis pute between rival camps of the lacers and non-laeers.
 At the outset we are compelled to admit that waist-that is to say some kind of construction of the dress-is an aesthetic necessity of proportion in the clothed hu- man figure, and especially of the female fig ure draped in long flowing skirts. Zeising, a distinguished German writer, has discovered a law of proportion which explains the sense of harmony we experience when we look on beautiful natural objects; and this law, when applied to the human body, explains why some persons are pleasing and others dis pleasing to our sense of the beautiful, or, what is the same thing, to our sense of pro portion. Shortly stated, Zeising's law of proportion runs thus: In objects divided into two unequal parts, to appear propor- tional, the shorter part Gin the human figure the head and bust) must bear the same rela- tion to the longer part G. @. from the waist to the feet) which the longer part bears to the whole object Ii. @. in man the lower sec- tion to the total stature) These proportions apply to every portion of the body as well as to the stature, and when reduced to figures have about the relation of three to two. Thus in the human figure the waist in per son of, say five feet high, should be three feet from the ground and two feet from the top of the head. These typical proportions are, however, only met with in tall women; hence the superior attractions of the "elance" figures of English and American women of Teutonic, or rather of Scandinavian origin, over those of the shorter Celtic types ot France, Spain and Italy, the countries from which we received the fashion of wearing corsets. Granting then, for the sake of ar~ gument, that @ waist of some kind is neces- sary to the human form, how does it happen that tieht-lacing is so often carried to excessl It is obviously not from conscious desire to conform to Zsising's law of proportion, for it is hidden away in a learned mathematical treatise, which is little known even in the land of it's birth Moreover, tight-lacing is many centuries old; for Harvey, in discuss ing the displacement of the abdominal or gans to the College of Physicians nearly three hundred years ago, declared that Hal- position of organs occurred in "yeoung girls by lacing," and he gives the advice, which is less frequently acted on now than formerly,