walls which he does not venture even to peep over.

It is hard to say in what department of human thought and endeavour
conformity has triumphed most. Religion comes to one's mind first;
and well it may when one thinks what men have conformed to in all
ages in that matter. If we pass to art, or science, we shall see
there too the wondrous slavery which men have endured--from puny
fetters, moreover, which one stirring thought would, as we think,
have burst asunder. The above, however, are matters not within
every one's cognisance; some of them are shut in by learning or the
show of it; and plain "practical" men would say, they follow where
they have no business but to follow. But the way in which the human
body shall be covered is not a thing for the scientific and the
learned only: and is allowed on all hands to concern, in no small
degree, one half at least of the creation. It is in such a simple
thing as dress that each of us may form some estimate of the extent
of conformity in the world. A wise nation, unsubdued by
superstition, with the collected experience of peaceful ages,
concludes that female feet are to be clothed by crushing them. The
still wiser nations of the west have adopted a swifter mode of
destroying health, and creating angularity, by crushing the upper
part of the female body. In such matters nearly all people conform.
Our brother man is seldom so bitter against us, as when we refuse to
adopt at once his notions of the infinite. But even religious
dissent were less dangerous and more respectable than dissent in
dress. If you want to see what men will do in the way of
conformity, take a European hat for your subject of meditation. I
dare say there are twenty-two millions of people at this minute each
wearing one of these hats in order to please the rest. As in the
fine arts, and in architecture, especially, so in dress, something