The penalties imposed by society for the infraction of very trifling
details of custom are often, as it seems, out of all proportion to the
offence; but so are the penalties of nature. Only three days before the
date of this letter, an intimate friend of mine was coming home from a
day's shooting. His nephew, a fine young man in the full enjoyment of
existence, was walking ten paces in advance. A covey of partridges
suddenly cross the road: my friend in shouldering his gun touches the
trigger just a second too soon, and kills his nephew. Now, think of the
long years of mental misery that will be the punishment of that very
trifling piece of carelessness! My poor friend has passed, in the space
of a single instant, from a joyous life to a life that is permanently
and irremediably saddened. It is as if he had left the summer sunshine
to enter a gloomy dungeon and begin a perpetual imprisonment. And for
what? For having touched a trigger, without evil intention, a little too
precipitately. It seems harder still for the victim, who is sent out of
the world in the bloom of perfect manhood because his uncle was not
quite so cool as he ought to have been. Again, not far from where I
live, thirty-five men were killed last week in a coal-pit from an
explosion of fire-damp. One of their number had struck a lucifer to
light his pipe: for doing this in a place where he ought not to have
done it, the man suffers the penalty of death, and thirty-four others
with him. The fact is simply that Nature _will_ be obeyed, and makes no
attempt to proportion punishments to offences: indeed, what in our human
way we call punishments are not punishments, but simple consequences. So
it is with the great social penalties. Society _will be obeyed_: if you
refuse obedience, you must take the consequences. Society has only one
law, and that is custom. Even religion itself is socially powerful only
just so far as it has custom on its side.

Nature does not desire that thirty-five men should be destroyed because
one could not resist the temptation of a pipe; but fire-damp is highly
inflammable, and the explosion is a simple consequence. Society does not
desire to exclude you because you will not wear evening dress; but the
dress is customary, and your exclusion is merely a consequence of your
nonconformity. The view of society goes no farther in this than the
artistic conception (not very delicately artistic, perhaps) that it is
prettier to see men in