In all the wide range of accepted British maxims there is none, take it for all in all, more thoroughly abominable than the one as to the sowing of wild oats. Look at it on what side you will, and you can make nothing but a devil’s maxim of it. What a man—be he young, old, or middle-aged—sows, _that_, and nothing else shall he reap. The one only thing to do with wild oats is to put them carefully into the hottest part of the fire, and get them burnt to dust, every seed of them. If you sow them, no matter in what ground, up they will come, with long, tough roots like couch-grass, and luxuriant stalks and leaves as sure as there is a sun in heaven—a crop which it makes one’s heart cold to think of. The devil, too, whose special crop they are, will see that they thrive, and you, and nobody else will have to reap them; and no common reaping will get them out of the soil, which must be dug down deep again and again. Well for you if, with all your care, you can make the ground sweet again by your dying day. “Boys will be boys,” is not much better, but that has a true side to it; but this encouragement to the sowing of wild oats is simply devilish, for it means that a young man is to give way to the temptations and follow the lusts of his age. What are we to do with the wild oats of manhood and old age—with ambition, over-reaching, the false weights, hardness, suspicion, avarice—if the wild oats of youth are to be sown and not burnt? What possible distinction can we draw between them? If we may sow the one, why not the other? LI. Man of all ages is a selfish animal, and unreasonable in his selfishness. It takes every one of us in turn many a shrewd fall, in our wrestlings with the world to convince us that we are not to have everything our own way. We are conscious in our inmost souls that man is the rightful lord of creation; and, starting from this eternal principle, and ignoring, each man-child of us in turn, the qualifying truth that it is to man in general, including women, and not to one man in particular, that the earth has been given, we set about asserting our kingships each in his own way, and proclaiming ourselves kings from our own little ant-hills of thrones. And then come the struggles and the down-fallings, and some of us learn our lesson, and some learn it not. But what lesson? That we have been dreaming in the golden hours when the vision of a kingdom rose before us? That there is in short, no kingdom at all, or that, if there be, we are no heirs of it?