A WRITER in The Ladies' Home Journal for August sets forth some contrasting conditions between the dress of women now and a generation ago. She rejoices over the things which have made for comfort, of the putting away of the vast weights in dress which were carried by women in the days of her youth, when, for instance, she speaks of a younger sister wearing four stiffly starched white petticoats. She refers also to the difference between the manner of dress then and to-day. Among other things equally striking she says: "I look at the girls of to-day, swinging along bareheaded, their corset-covers strung on pink or blue ribbons shining boldly through thin 'peek-a-boo' waists, their thin skirts outlining their figures, and their feet clad in frivolous pumps, and I do wonder sometimes where it is going to stop. . . .15"People are putting their heads together a good deal in late years over the immorality of young men at college. It is admitted that conditions are awful, yet what are we to do? Does it never occur to girls and women that they are very largely responsible for the morals of the men in their world? I am convinced that the general appearance of girls and women on the streets, at places of amusement, and even at home, has, in late years, an immoral effect upon young men. . . . "I went with a wealthy friend of mine to look at a gown she had thought of purchasing. The saleswoman told her she had sold it that very morning to one of the most notorious women in the city. In my eyes the gown had been from the start a wretched rag of tawdry finery, unfit for a lady to wear; but I knew many ladies who were wearing such gowns, and who thought them 'dead swell,' and the price of the 'little gown,' as they called it, was one hundred fifty dollars. Now the fact that a lovely lady and the mistress of a house of ill fame should take a fancy to the same gown, and that the latter should get it, to the chagrin of the former, is in my mind significant of my argument that there is something wrong with the fashions, and that they are based on lines of immorality. "Among other things which I think bear the patent stamp of pure immorality may be mentioned the 'peek-a-boo' waist. Its name certainly should convey to us its manifest impropriety. Yet I have heard girls speak of these waists by this name in the presence of young men. Have you thought, mother, of the sheer bad taste exhibited here, to say nothing of the impropriety? What can be the object of a hole in a waist, save to show what is under it? You say the girl's corset-cover and the dainty ribbon that ties it 'look so pretty.' Doubtless your daughter looks pretty in her night-dress, but you do not wish her to sit on the front veranda in it. Yet would not this be almost as proper a proceeding as her going down-town with her underwear plainly displayed through the open pattern of her 'peek-a-boo' waist? "If you ask me plainly if I believe that such dressing on the part of nice girls has an immoral effect upon the young men they associate with, I answer frankly, 'Yes.' It is a breaking down of safeguards we once set up for young folks, and I believe the breaking down of these safeguards leaves the transition from youthful passion to plain immorality a much simpler step than it was in the old days of greater modesty and a more severe moral code. The girl herself may not, indeed, suffer from this exposure of her charms, because she does it unconsciously. Woman's vanity blinds her to the impropriety of the thing she is doing and she forgets that she may thus harm others without actually suffering herself."