Note 32 — (First Pilgrimage.) (continued 4)

The public and promiscuous bathing of both sexes, so common on the Continent, is more easily condemned by prejudice than convicted by argument. I confess that I was fairly beaten out of the field by a German philosopher, while discussing the point. First, he urged the antiquity of the practice—the Romans having public baths for both sexes indiscriminately, on a most magnificent scale. The larger the bath, however, the less the objection, and vice versa, which he acknowledged. Secondly, he asked me what there was in the element water, to render promiscuous assemblages of the sexes more indelicate than in the element air? I answered that in the latter element the people were dressed. Dressed! he exclaimed. Why in the bath they are closely clothed from the chin to the soles of the feet; while in the ball-room the ladies exclude dress from every spot which they dare expose without outraging decency! There was no denying this. He added that, it was surely as unobjectionable for invalids of both sexes to walk and wade about in the bath, during the open day, as for people in high health to waltz about in crowded assemblies, during the middle of the night. On observing that the English were shocked at the practice of bathing promiscuously, because their eyes were unaccustomed to the sight; he replied, “exactly so—and the Germans, who are accustomed to it, feel nothing at all on the occasion.” The only objection on which I was obliged to fall back, was the loss of friction and shampooing in the bath—a drawback which the German admitted as unavoidable in public baths, but which, he maintained, was, in some degree, compensated for by the pleasure of conversation and society.