consider his want of respect, or want of
breeding; that thus his eccentricities cannot be indulged save at the
expense of his neighbours' feelings; and that hence his nonconformity is
in plain terms selfishness.

He answers that this position, if logically developed, would deprive men
of all liberty whatever. Each must conform all his acts to the public
taste, and not his own. The public taste on every point having been once
ascertained, men's habits must thenceforth remain for ever fixed; seeing
that no man can adopt other habits without sinning against the public
taste, and giving people disagreeable feelings. Consequently, be it an
era of pig-tails or high-heeled shoes, of starched ruffs or trunk-hose,
all must continue to wear pig-tails, high-heeled shoes, starched ruffs,
or trunk-hose to the crack of doom.

If it be still urged that he is not justified in breaking through
others' forms that he may establish his own, and so sacrificing the
wishes of many to the wishes of one, he replies that all religious and
political changes might be negatived on like grounds. He asks whether
Luther's sayings and doings were not extremely offensive to the mass of
his contemporaries; whether the resistance of Hampden was not disgusting
to the time-servers around him; whether every reformer has not shocked
men's prejudices, and given immense displeasure by the opinions he
uttered. The affirmative answer he follows up by demanding what right
the reformer has, then, to utter these opinions; whether he is not
sacrificing the feelings of many to the feelings of one; and so proves
that, to be consistent, his antagonists must condemn not only all
nonconformity in actions, but all nonconformity in thoughts.

His antagonists rejoin that _his_ position, too, may be pushed to an
absurdity. They argue that if a man may offend by the disregard of some
forms, he may as legitimately do so by the disregard of all; and they
inquire--Why should he not go out to dinner in a dirty shirt, and with
an unshorn chin? Why should he not spit on the drawing-room carpet, and
stretch his heels up to the mantle-shelf?

The convention-breaker answers, that to ask this, implies a confounding
of two widely-different classes of actions--the actions that are
_essentially_ displeasurable to those around, with the actions that are
but _incidentally_ displeasurable to them. He whose skin is so unclean
as to offend the nostrils of his neighbours, or he who talks so