Yes, to be appraised as a thoroughly respectable man among Philistines, you must either possess scanty ideas, or you must perpetually dissemble your opinions. Dr. Stockman, in Ibsen's "An Enemy of Society," is ostracised by respectable society because he refuses to be an unmitigated liar. A finer satire on Respectability has never been written. Stockman discovers that the water supply of the town is polluted, and he tells the truth about it. The respectable authorities, the tag-rag of the bourgeoisie, and the toady editor of the local journal--who is at heart a Freethinker--hoot him down in compliance with the "respectable" methods of toleration usually accorded to reformers. At a public meeting the Doctor says: "I am going to make a great revelation to you, fellow-citizens! I am going to disclose that to you which is of infinitely more moment than the unimportant fact that our waterworks are poisonous, and that our hygienic baths are built upon a soil teeming with pestilence.... I have said I should speak of the great discovery I have made within the last few days--the discovery that all our spiritual sources of life are poisoned, and that our whole bourgeois society rests upon a soil teeming with the pestilence of lies. For I am going to revolt against the lie that truth resides in the majority." Upon reading a Philistine opinion of himself, Diderot laughed, and said: "I must be an eccentric sort of fellow: but is it such a great fault to have preserved amid all the friction of society some vestiges of the angularity of nature?" No thralls to Respectability can ever be natural men and women. The respectability of the middle-class is largely a growth of the Calvinistic theory of submission and poorness of spirit; the effort of the Respectables is towards docile conformity to the custom of their narrow community, "until," as Mill says, "by dint of not following their own nature, they have no nature to follow: their human capacities are withered and starved: they become incapable of any strong wishes or native pleasures, and are generally without either opinions or feelings of home growth or properly their own." No fanatical fakir ever endured the torments that some English folk inflict upon themselves before the Mumbo Jumbo of respectability. Dwarfed social endeavour, suppressed healthy desires, degraded faculties--these are the sacrifices in the name of conventionality. Daily, men and women do a score of things that they know to be hurtful and insane, because they fear to be accounted "peculiar," and "not quite respectable;" and so it comes about that "the keeping up of appearances," as it is called, the incessant striving to be popular at all costs, engenders endless hypocrisies and falsehoods, and makes knaves and cowards.