do not wish to have their hearts rent assunder by the premature death of wife or children, to marry a woman having a large waist, full breast, and deep, broad chest. Such will live long: but slim, small-waisted women must, in the very nature of things, bury their children and die young themselves. If this pernicious practice continue to rage through another generation with as much violence as it has for the last and present, it will kill all fashionable women and their children, and leave our square-formed, broad-shouldered, and full-breasted Irish and German women alone for wives and mothers. It has already alarmingly deteriorated our race in both physical and intellectual stature, and unless checked, will soon destroy it. Let this practice be continued, and nothing can save us as a nation: let it be abolished, and our nation will soon stand at the head of the world in every desirable quality.
No tongue can tell the number of mothers and children killed outright, or else made to drag out a short and miserable existence, by that accursed practice of tight-lacing. Most effectually does it cramp, and girt in, and deaden the vital apparatus, and thus stop the flow of vitality at its fountain head, killing its thousands before they marry, and so effectually weakening others, as indirectly, though effectually, to cause the death of tens of thousands, aye, of millions more. Yes, and that even by Christian mothers—by the daughters of Zion, the followers of Jesus! Yea, more. These infanticides, with their corsets actually on, are admitted into the sanctuary of the Most High God, and even to the communion-table of the saints! And poor, muffle-drummed ministers, either do not know that corseting does any damage, or, knowing it, do not open their mealy mouths, but administer the sacrament to infanticides, and to those who, while partaking of the emblems of their dying Saviour, are 'in the very act' of committing infanticide, and slow, but effectual suicide! Nor is it thought any sin in American Christian mothers committing these things, whereas missionaries must be sent to China and Bombay, to prevent their committing these very same crimes, though by a process as much less horrible, as to be killed outright by one fell blow, is less painful than to be gradually starved and strangled, till a lingering, and therefore a most horrid death, gives relief.
I appeal to every patriot, to every Christian, to every physiologist, to raise his voice with mine in the extirpation of this great sin of tight-laclng. Let the finger of scorn be pointed at every tight-laced woman, and let small waists be shunned, instead of courted, as wives and mothers. The practice is disgraceful, is immoral, is murderous: for it is gradual suicide, and almost certain infanticide. It is worse than infanticide; for, to entail a diseased body and mind upon offspring, in addition to causing their premature death, is a crime of the deepest dye man can commit.
Wherein consists the difference between sowing the seeds of disease that necessarily hasten death, and killing the child outright? The end attained is the same—the means of the former are as much more horrible than those of the latter, as a lingereng death is more horrid than a sudden one. Whence that mortality of children which consigns more than one half of all that are born in our cities to an early grave? Is it natural?—apart of the necessary operations of nature? No! it is violated nature; and I fearlessly avow, and appeal to the decision of any man of science acquainted with the subject, whether this is not the most effectual cause of infantile death, or, what amounts to the same thing, the means of that most revolting of all crimes—infanticide? Remember, ye young ladies, who, in dressing yourselves off for the ball or fashionable party, or promenade. I beseech you remember, that you are not only sowing the seeds of disease and premature death, which will nip all your pleasures in the bud, but which must also yield you a harvest of sorrows too many to number and too aggravated to endure—that you are bringing down not only your own soul with sorrow to
