pon society and
families by these fine philosophical discoveries, and by their triumph
over prejudices of the sort I have described, had better remain
unwritten.

The few who stood aloof and mocked at fashions--fashions which fade and
fall each year like autumn leaves--were quizzed as ignoramuses,
blockheads, zanies tainted with the leprosy of prejudice.[20] They
passed for stolid, coarse-grained creatures, void of thrill, of
sentiment, of taste, of culture, delicacy, and refined perception. Women
and men, in one vast herd, became illuminated visionaries. They piqued
themselves upon their intuition and originality. They discovered endless
harmonies and discords, all imaginary; endless comforts and discomforts,
all imaginary; endless imaginary savours, insipidities, depravities in
things about them, in furniture, in dress, in colours, in decorations,
in the kitchen, in food, in wine, in dressing of the table, all
imaginary. They detected elegance or inelegance in every dumb and
senseless object: down to the basest of utensils there was nothing which
escaped the epithet of elegant. Let thus much be said for truth's sake,
with the patience which is needful nowadays in speaking truth to folk
infected by the real and not the spurious leprosy of prejudice.

Well, when all the so-called prejudices which I have just described had
been put to flight and dissipated by the piercing sunbeams of the
innovators, many great and remarkable blessings appeared in their room.
These were the blessings of irreligion, of respect and reverence
annulled, of justice overturned, of law-courts made the play-ground for
flagitious vices, of criminals encouraged and bewept, of heated
imaginations, sharpened senses, animalism, indulgence in all lusts and
passions, of imperious luxury, with her brood of violent insatiable
desires, deceits, intrigues, oppressions, losses of faith and honesty
and honour, swindlings, pilferings, bankruptcies, pecuniary straits,
base traffickings in sexual bargains, adulteries, the marriage-tie made
unendurable and snapped by force or cold collusion.

After such wise, by turning the innocent word 'prejudice' into a weapon
of attack against everything which restrained vice, crime, illicit
pleasure, violence, and social profligacy--against whatever, in short,
rationally deserves to be called prejudice--the human race plunged
willingly and universally into a pitiable and apparently immedicable
state of pure unvarnished pr