Morals are by no means free from this kind of conventionalism: so much the contrary, that few things evince more strongly the power of fashion. It might be imagined that the multiplication of examples would tend to teach the true nature of the thing exemplified; but it would not seem so with error; "_tout au contraire_." Arts or acts, which are tabooed as vicious in the singular number, become, in the plasticity of our moral grammars, very tolerable in the plural. Things that the most hardy shrink from perpetrating _single-handed_, are regarded as easy "compliances with custom" when "joint-stock" vices; practices which, when partial, men are penetrating enough to discover to be unchristian, or sufficiently sensitive to regard as ungentlemanly, pass muster with marvellous lubricity when they become universal. We can anathemize, with self-complacent indignation, vices in which we have no share; but we are abundantly charitable when we discuss those in which we have a common property; and, finally, moral accounts are settled very much to our own satisfaction, as Butler says, by compounding "For sins we are inclined to, By damning those we have no mind to." After all, society keeps a pretty good "look-out" after offences distributed in common. The law is tolerably comprehensive of things which are of general commission; and mankind, sooner or later, contrive to catch, or successfully oppose, the numerous little enormities which slip through the finest of our legal meshes. "Raro antecedentem scelestum, Deseruit pede pœna claudo." From all this it results that moral obliquities, which fall within the observation of society, make but an up-hill game; that which is _felt_ to be prejudicial to the interests of all men, is easily determined to be vicious. But here again there is much in fashion. Society has often determined that the immorality of a thing is not to be measured by the nature of the act, nor the motive even on which it has been founded, so much as by the more refined test afforded by the _position_ of the _actor_. One man may, like a sort of commercial megatherium, gorge, with railway velocity, provisions which a once-breathing, fond affection and a cold world had alike determined to be the life-blood of widows and orphans, and yet have noblemen and others for his associate! he may perhaps be a legislator in a great nation; whilst the poor starveling, who steals for the vulgar purpose of satisfying hunger, may be sent to the treadmill, where he may solve at leisure the problem thus set him, by "the most enlightened nation on earth."