What would a nation be without a flag? What is a nation without a costume? A flag is an emblem, a costume is a property. A flag designates and defies, a costume ennobles and preserves. A flag has come by accident, costume is the produce of a people’s taste. The Medes had a dress; the Persians, the Romans, the Egyptians had each a dress. To say, then, a dress, is to say a people. A costume is to a people like its mountains, its floods, and its lakes. The costume of its land and its fathers has been to every noble people like their tongue, their fame, their precepts, and their laws; in independence, giving dignity; in chains, none. The tyrant and the patriot alike know its worth. The wandering Israelite for two thousand years, has worn, concealed on his person, the proscribed garb of Judæa--a mystic shred, the emblem and promise of restoration. So late as the middle of the last century, the Parliament of England did not conceive its dominion secure until it had put down the Highland dress. The last in Europe to retain one, the Spaniard has yet a costume. He is in the act of surrendering it, yet no foreign hordes cover the Peninsula and hunt down its inhabitants. Itself, with unnatural hands, tears it off and casts it away, and adopts in lieu of it a foreign garb--which, indeed, is no garb--for it belongs to no people, furnished forth not by a combination of the tastes of all the people of Europe, but by a concentration of their vulgarism. Have they changed with a purpose Ask them: they can give you no reason for what it means. “_It is the fashion._” I have a curious illustration before me, where I am correcting these pages. On the side of Benledi there is a vale, now, with the exception of a few fields, uncultivated below, and bare of trees above. In the wilderness, a burial-ground may be traced, the record of an _extinct clan_, the last having left the country forty years ago. Immediately above, a hollow in the rock is called, “The Deer’s Repose.” The antlered tribe has also disappeared--forests, deer, culture, and men are all gone. There are six families: the patriarch (still living) in his youthful days remembered twelve. None of the younger generation are married--at least, in their native valley. While seeking into the causes of this decay, I found that they were _changing their diet_[102]--the last thing a nation changes. They had loaf-bread from Callender. I asked, “Do you like it better?” “No.” “Is it cheaper?” “No.” “Is it more healthy? Have you no time to knead your cakes? Do you not know how to spend your money?” “No! no!” At last out came--“_It is the fashion._” If the Stuarts of Glenfinlass had said, “It is the custom,” instead of “It is the fashion,” the families would not have fallen from twelve to six within one generation; the sheep would not have eaten up the deer and the forest.