If it be a fact that men of revolutionary aims in politics or religion, are commonly revolutionists in custom also, it is not less a fact that those whose office it is to uphold established arrangements in State and Church, are also those who most adhere to the social forms and observances bequeathed to us by past generations.  Practices elsewhere extinct still linger about the headquarters of government.  The monarch still gives assent to Acts of Parliament in the old French of the Normans; and Norman French terms are still used in law.  Wigs, such as those we see depicted in old portraits, may yet be found on the heads of judges and barristers.  The Beefeaters at the Tower wear the costume of Henry VIIth’s bodyguard.  The University dress of the present year varies but little from that worn soon after the Reformation.  The claret-coloured coat, knee-breeches, lace shirt frills, ruffles, white silk stockings, and buckled shoes, which once formed the usual attire of a gentleman, still survive as the court-dress.  And it need scarcely be said that at levees and drawing-rooms, the ceremonies are prescribed with an exactness, and enforced with a rigour, not elsewhere to be found.

Can we consider these two series of coincidences as accidental and unmeaning?  Must we not rather conclude that some necessary relationship obtains between them?  Are there not such things as a constitutional conservatism, and a constitutional tendency to change?  Is there not a class which clings to the old in all things; and another class so in love with progress as often to mistake novelty for improvement?  Do we not find some men ready to bow to established authority of whatever kind; while others demand of every such authority its reason, and reject it if it fails to justify itself?  And must not the minds thus contrasted tend to become respectively conformist and nonconformist, not only in politics and religion, but in other things?  Submission, whether to a government, to the dogmas of ecclesiastics, or to that code of behaviour which society at large has set up, is essentially of the same nature; and the sentiment which induces resistance to the despotism of rulers, civil or spiritual, likewise induces resistance to the despotism of the world’s opinion.  Look at them fundamentally, and all enactments, alike of the legislature, the consistory, and the saloon—­all regulations, formal or virtual, have a common character:  they are all limitations of men’s freedom.  “Do this—­Refrain from that,” are the blank formulas into which they may all be written:  and in each case the understanding is that obedience will bring approbation here and paradise hereafter; while disobedience will entail imprisonment, or sending to Coventry, or eternal torments, as the case may be.  And if restraints, however named, and through whatever apparatus of means exercised, are one in their action upon men, it must happen that those who are patient under one kind of restraint, are likely to be patient under another; and conversely, that those impatient of restraint in general, will, on the average, tend to show their impatience in all directions.