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SIR,--I am not hopeful that the refined cruelty, so unseemly boasted of by "Finished Figure" and her friends, will be stopped as a result of anything I or anyone else have to say, but will you allow me to protest as strongly as I can against its barbarity ? Because, forsooth! a woman has lost control (if she ever had it) over her children, she must needs go and strap them in an instrument of torture! Was ever such a thing heard boasted of outside the walls of the Inquisition? Might I suggest as alternatives the thumb screw, the boot-jack, or even the body-rack as further aids to proper behaviour? Many of your readers know a little, at any rate, about physiology and anatomy. Listen, and imagine all that happens when "F. F." applies her treatment. Two young, healthy, jolly girls thoroughly enjoy a game of lawn tennis. Some wasps (i.e., people with slim waists) suggest, and the mother. at once agrees, to clap the girls in "very long, heavily-boned stays, with stiff, broad busks, preventing stooping, besides being very uncomfortable." This" enforced patience and submission." To punish them" tighten the culprits' (a word quite in keeping with the savagery of the operation) lace so as to entail an extra degree of discomfort." At night "lace them in one inch smaller than before." And what is one of the grand, chief results ? No language can describe the horror with which I read it, knowing its meaning, "they are becoming beautifully white." The treatment of "F. F.'s" stepson is brutal in the extreme. Does it not make one's blood boil to hear anyone talk so flippantly of brutalities worthy only of the thirteenth century? Talk about the open brutality that we hear so much about among the poor--for a specimen of the very essence of cruelty refer to the refined, modernised inhumanity of "Finished Figure." W. A. DAVIDSON.

to "Finished Figure"; from W. A. Davidson.

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