In other cases, again, his courage fails him.  Such of his unconventionalities as can be attributed only to eccentricity, he has no qualms about:  for, on the whole, he feels rather complimented than otherwise in being considered a disregarder of public opinion.  But when they are liable to be put down to ignorance, to ill-breeding, or to poverty, he becomes a coward.  However clearly the recent innovation of eating some kinds of fish with knife and fork proves the fork-and-bread practice to have had little but caprice for its basis, yet he dares not wholly ignore that practice while fashion partially maintains it.  Though he thinks that a silk handkerchief is quite as appropriate for drawing-room use as a white cambric one, he is not altogether at ease in acting out his opinion.  Then, too, he begins to perceive that his resistance to prescription brings round disadvantageous results which he had not calculated upon.  He had expected that it would save him from a great deal of social intercourse of a frivolous kind—­that it would offend the fools, but not the sensible people; and so would serve as a self-acting test by which those worth knowing would be separated from those not worth knowing.  But the fools prove to be so greatly in the majority that, by offending them, he closes against himself nearly all the avenues though which the sensible people are to be reached.  Thus he finds, that his nonconformity is frequently misinterpreted; that there are but few directions in which he dares to carry it consistently out; that the annoyances and disadvantages which it brings upon him are greater than he anticipated; and that the chances of his doing any good are very remote.  Hence he gradually loses resolution, and lapses, step by step, into the ordinary routine of observances.

Abortive as individual protests thus generally turn out, it may possibly be that nothing effectual will be done until there arises some organised resistance to this invisible despotism, by which our modes and habits are dictated.  It may happen, that the government of Manners and Fashion will be rendered less tyrannical, as the political and religious governments have been, by some antagonistic union.  Alike in Church and State, men’s first emancipations from excess of restriction were achieved by numbers, bound together by a common creed or a common political faith.  What remained undone while there were but individual schismatics or rebels, was effected when there came to be many acting in concert.  It is tolerably clear that these earliest instalments of freedom could not have been obtained in any other way; for so long as the feeling of personal independence was weak and the rule strong, there could never have been a sufficient number of separate dissentients to produce the desired results.  Only in these later times, during which the secular and spiritual controls have been growing less coercive, and the tendency towards individual liberty greater, has it become possible for smaller and smaller sects and parties to fight against established creeds and laws; until now men may safely stand even alone in their antagonism.