How this crisis will be brought about, no one can say. Whether by the continuance and increase of individual protests, or whether by the union of many persons for the practice and diffusion of better usages, the future alone can decide. The influence of dissentients acting without co-operation, seems inadequate. Frowned on by conformists, and expostulated with even by those who secretly sympathize with them; subject to petty persecutions, and {47} unable to trace any benefit produced by their example; they are apt, one by one, to give up their attempts as hopeless. The young convention-breaker eventually finds that he pays too heavily for his nonconformity. Hating, for example, everything that bears about it any remnant of servility, he determines, in the ardour of his independence, that he will uncover to no one. But what he means simply as a general protest, he finds that ladies interpret into a personal disrespect. In other cases 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.[4] 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 silly people, 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 silly people prove to be so greatly in the majority that, by offending them, he closes against himself nearly all the avenues through 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 {48} to carry it consistently out; that the disadvantages it entails 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. [4] This was written before the introduction of silver fish-knives.