But what is the use of wasting this beneficial power of rebellion on matters too trivial to be worth attention? Does it hurt your conscience to appear in a dress-coat? Certainly not, and you would be as good-looking in it as you are in your velveteen shooting-jacket with the pointers on the bronze buttons. Let us conform in these trivial matters, which nobody except a tailor ought to consider worth a moment's attention, in order to reserve our strength for the protection of intellectual liberty. Let society arrange your dress for you (it will save you infinite trouble), but never permit it to stifle the expression of your thought. You find it convenient, because you are timid, to exclude yourself from the world by refusing to wear its costume; but a bolder man would let the tailor do his worst, and then go into the world and courageously defend there the persons and causes that are misunderstood and slanderously misrepresented. The fables of Spenser are fables only in form, and a noble knight may at any time go forth, armed in the panoply of a tail-coat, a dress waistcoat, and a manly moral courage, to do battle across the dinner-table and in the drawing-room for those who have none to defend them. It is unphilosophical to set ourselves obstinately against custom in the mass, for it multiplies the power of men by settling useless discussion and clearing the ground for our best and most prolific activity. The business of the world could not be carried forward one day without a most complex code of customs; and law itself is little more than custom slightly improved upon by men reflecting together at their leisure, and reduced to codes and systems. We ought to think of custom as a most precious legacy of the past, saving us infinite perplexity, yet not as an infallible rule. The most intelligent community would be conservative in its habits, yet not obstinately conservative, but willing to hear and adopt the suggestions of advancing reason. The great duty of the intellectual class, and its especial function, is to confirm what is reasonable in the customs that have been handed down to us, and so maintain their authority, yet at the same time to show that custom is not final, but merely a form suited to the world's convenience. And whenever you are convinced that a custom is no longer serviceable, the way to procure the abolition of it is to lead men very gradually away from it, by offering a substitute at first very slightly different from what they have been long used to. If the English had been in the habit of tattooing, the best way to procure its abolition would have been to admit that it was quite necessary to cover the face with elaborate patterns, yet gently to suggest that these patterns would be still more elegant if delicately painted in water-colors. Then you might have gone on arguing--still admitting, of course, the absolute necessity for ornament of some kind--that good taste demanded only a moderate amount