black coats regularly placed between ladies round
a dinner-table than men in gray coats or brown coats. The uniformity of
costume appears to represent uniformity of sentiment and to ensure a
sort of harmony amongst the _convives_. What society really cares for is
harmony; what it dislikes is dissent and nonconformity. It wants peace
in the dining-room, peace in the drawing-room, peace everywhere in its
realm of tranquil pleasure. You come in your shooting-coat, which was in
tune upon the moors, but is a dissonance amongst ladies in full dress.
Do you not perceive that fustian and velveteen, which were natural
amongst gamekeepers, are not so natural on gilded chairs covered with
silk, with lace and diamonds at a distance of three feet? You don't
perceive it? Very well: society does not argue the point with you, but
only excludes you.

It has been said that in the life of every intellectual man there comes
a time when he questions custom at all points. This seems to be a
provision of nature for the reform and progress of custom itself, which
without such questioning would remain absolutely stationary and
irresistibly despotic. You rebels against the established custom have
your place in the great work of progressive civilization. Without you,
Western Europe would have been a second China. It is to the continual
rebellion of such persons as yourself that we owe whatever progress has
been accomplished since the times of our remotest forefathers. There
have been rebels always, and the rebels have not been, generally
speaking, the most stupid part of the nation.

But what is the use of wasting this beneficial power of rebellion on
matters too trivial to be worth attention? Does it hurt your conscience
to appear in a dress-coat? Certainly not, and you would be as
good-looking in it as you are in your velveteen shooting-jacket with the
pointers on the bronze buttons. Let us conform in these trivial matters,
which nobody except a tailor ought to consider worth a moment's
attention, in order to reserve our strength for the protection of
intellectual liberty. Let society arrange your dress for you (it will
save you infinite trouble), but never permit it to stifle the expression
of your thought. You find it convenient, because you are timid, to
exclude yourself from the world by refusing to wear its costume; but a
bolder man would let the tailor do his worst, and then go into the world
and courageously defend there the persons and