on of
costumes will also be enforced; that if we ever have a new Hierarchy
and Aristocracy, acknowledged veritably as such, for which I daily
pray Heaven, the Tailor will reawaken; and be, by volunteering and
appointment, consciously and unconsciously, a safeguard of that
same.'--Certain farther observations, from the same invaluable pen, on
our never-ending changes of mode, our 'perpetual nomadic and even
ape-like appetite for change and mere change' in all the equipments of
our existence, and the 'fatal revolutionary character' thereby
manifested, we suppress for the present. It may be admitted that
Democracy, in all meanings of the word, is in full career;
irresistible by any Ritter Kauderwaelsch or other Son of Adam, as times
go. 'Liberty' is a thing men are determined to have.

* * * * *

But truly, as I had to remark in the mean while, 'the liberty of not
being oppressed by your fellow man' is an indispensable, yet one of
the most insignificant fractional parts of Human Liberty. No man
oppresses thee, can bid thee fetch or carry, come or go, without
reason shown. True; from all men thou art emancipated: but from
Thyself and from the Devil--? No man, wiser, unwiser, can make thee
come or go: but thy own futilities, bewilderments, thy false appetites
for Money, Windsor Georges and suchlike? No man oppresses thee, O free
and independent Franchiser: but does not this stupid Porter-pot
oppress thee? No Son of Adam can bid thee come or go; but this absurd
Pot of Heavy-wet, this can and does! Thou art the thrall not of Cedric
the Saxon, but of thy own brutal appetites and this scoured dish of
liquor. And thou pratest of thy 'liberty'? Thou entire blockhead!

Heavy-wet and gin: alas, these are not the only kinds of thraldom.
Thou who walkest in a vain show, looking out with ornamental
dilettante sniff and serene supremacy at all Life and all Death; and
amblest jauntily; perking up thy poor talk into crotchets, thy poor
conduct into fatuous somnambulisms;--and _art_ as an 'enchanted Ape'
under God's sky, where thou mightest have been a man, had proper
Schoolmasters and Conquerors, and Constables with cat-o'-nine tails,
been vouchsafed thee; dost thou call that 'liberty'? Or your
unreposing Mammon-worshipper again, driven, as if by Galvanisms, by
Devils and Fixed-Ideas, who rises early and sits late, chasing the
impossible; straining every faculty to 'fill himself with the east
wind,'--how