the Erebus and Terror, it is not likely that those quitted their ships in poor fellows would have a season so rigorous, and so long before the Great Fish River would be open for navigation. We should be the last to say this, if there were a shadow of founda- tion for farther hope, either to save life or to obtain such records as would throw more light on the labours and zeal of those noble ships’ companies.
As those men fell in their last sad struggle to reach home, their prayer must have been that their countrymen might learn how nobly they accomplished the task they had voluntarily undertaken. That prayer has been granted. As long as Britain exists, or our language is spoken, so long will be remembered and related the glorious fate of the crews of the Erebus and Terror, and how nobly they died in the execution of their duty to their Queen and country.
DRESS AND ITS VICTIMS.
There are a good many people who cannot
possibly believe that dress can have any share in
the deaths of the 100,000 persons who go needlessly to the grave every year in our happy
England, where there are more means of comfort for
everybody than in any other country in Europe.
How can people be killed by dress, now-a-days? they ask. We must be thinking of the old times when the ladies laced so tight that “salts and strong waters ” seem to have been called for to some fainting fair one, as often as numbers were collected together, whether at church, or at Ranelagh, or the theatres. Or perhaps we are thinking of the accidents that have happened during particular fashions of dress, as the burning of the Marchioness of Salisbury, from her high cap nodding over the candle; or the deaths of the Ladies Bridgeman last year, from the skirts of one of them catching fire at the grate; or the number of inquests held during the fashion of gigot-sleeves, when a lady could scarcely dine in company, or play the piano at home, without peril of death by fire.
Perhaps it may be the heavy, towering head-dresses of the last century we may be thinking of, bringing in a crowd of bad symptoms, headaches, congestions, fits, palsies, with the fearful remedies of bleeding and reducing, which we read of in medical books, and in gossiping literature, like Horace Walpole’s correspondence. Or we may even be thinking of the barbaric fashion of painting the face, neck, and hands, at one time carried on to the excess of enamelling the skin. That was not at so very remote a time; for I have heard from the lips of witnesses what it was like; and a friend of mine, yet living, can tell what she saw at a concert where a lady sat before her with a pair of broad shoulders which looked like tawny marble, — as smooth, as shining, and as little like anything human. These shoulders were once enamelled, and may have looked white in their day; but no life-long pains to renew their whiteness -would serve after a certain lapse of time; and there they were, hopeless, tawny, and the quality of the skin destroyed. The poisonings by means of cosmetics we read of in the history of past centuries, may have been sometimes intentional; but there was plenty of unconscious poisoning besides.
We do not, however, mean any of these things when we speak of dress, in connection with preventive mortality.
Perhaps I may be supposed to be referring to the notoriously afflicted and short-lived classes of milliners and slop- workers who are worn out and killed off in the cause of dress. No; I am not now going to bring forward their case, because it comes under a different head. At this moment I am not thinking of either the political economy or the general morality of the dress-question, or I should bring up the group of suicides who have perished, some from hopeless poverty, some from intolerable degradation, and some from the embarrassment of gambling debts incurred for the sake of dress.
If the secrets of the city were known, we might hear of more tragedies than the theatres show, from the spread of gambling among women, and especially among servant-girls and shop-women, who have been carried beyond bounds by the extravagant fashion of the day. But I am not speaking of suicides, nor of the victims of the needle, whose case is too grave to be treated lightly, and whose day of deliverance, too, is at hand, if the sewing-machine is the reality it appears — and not a phantom — cheating the hopes of thousands. We may possibly look into that another time. Meanwhile our business is with the injurious and sometimes murderous effect of dress which we see worn every day.
It will not seem so wonderful that the familiar clothing of our neighbours and ourselves may be of such importance when we remember the explanations of physicians — that dress may, and usually
does, affect the condition and action of almost