Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/760

740. The laboring-men of this country, who from their childhood wear heavy, stiff, and badly shaped boots, and in whom, consequently, the play of the ankle, feet, and toes is lost, have generally small and shapeless legs and wasted calves, and walk as if on stilts, with a swinging motion from the hips. Our infantry soldiers also suffer much in the same manner, the regulation boots in use in the service being exceedingly ill adapted for the development of the feet. Much injury to the general health—the necessary consequence of any impediment to freedom of bodily exercise—must also be attributed to this cause. Since some of the leading shoemakers have ventured to deviate a little from the conventional shape, those persons who can afford to be specially fitted are better off as a rule than the majority of poorer people, who, although caring less for appearance, and being more dependent for their livelihood upon the physical welfare of their bodies, are obliged to wear ready-made shoes of the form that an inexorable custom has prescribed.

No sensible person can really suppose that there is anything in itself ugly, or even unsightly, in the form of a perfect human foot; and yet all attempts to construct shoes upon its model are constantly met with the objection that something extremely inelegant must be the result. It will, perhaps, be a form to which the eye is not quite accustomed; but we all know how extremely arbitrary is Fashion in her dealings with our outward appearance, and how anything which has received her sanction is for the time considered elegant and tasteful, while a few years later it may come to be looked upon as positively ridiculous. That our eye would soon get used to admire a different shape may be easily proved by any one who will for a short time wear shoes constructed upon a more correct principle, when the prevailing pointed shoes, suggestive of cramped and atrophied toes, become positively painful to look upon.

Only one thing is needed to aggravate the evil effect of a pointed toe, and that is the absurdly high and narrow heel so often seen now on ladies' boots, which throws the whole foot into an unnatural position in walking, produces diseases well known to all surgeons in large practice, and makes the nearest approach yet effected by any European nation to the Chinese custom which we generally speak of with surprise and reprobation. And yet this fashion appears just now on the increase among people who boast of the highest civilization to which the world has yet attained.

But when, in spite of all the warnings of common sense and experience, we continue to torture and deform our horses' mouths and necks with tight bearing-reins, as injurious, as useless, and as ugly as any of these customs we practice on ourselves, and all for no better reason, we may well say with Dr. Johnson, "Few enterprises are so hopeless as a contest with fashion."