But there are immutable _principles_. To spit in a guest's face is with some savage tribes a mark of respect. But this does not invalidate the principle that to guests should be shown courtesy. Rules vary with time and place, principles are eternal; and even if unmentionable things are done in Africa and Polynesia, if 'the dark places of the earth are full of cruelty,' that does not invalidate the principles of morality, as our modern blood-and-thunder young man affects to believe. For that the principles of right and justice have not yet been discovered in barbarous countries no more destroys their universality and legitimacy than the principles of the differential calculus are affected by the primitive practice of counting on the fingers. And while the ethical geniuses--the senior wranglers of the soul--are groping towards further truths and finer shades of feeling, deeper reaches of pity and subtler perceptions of justice, the rank and file and the wooden spoons must needs apply the old ethics, even against the new teachers themselves. Every truth has to fight for recognition, to prove itself not a lie. The brilliant and impatient young men who scoff at conventions because the people who hold them are unreal--not persons, feeling and passing moral truths through their own soul, but parrots--forget that just because the people are unreal, their maxims are real; that they do not represent the people who mouth them, but the great moralists and thinkers behind. Against the brilliant rushlights of contemporary cleverness shine the stars of the ages. 'T is the immemorial mistake of iconoclasts--even granted they are taller than their fellow-men--to be ever conscious of the extra inches, instead of the common feet. Nevertheless" (and here the Young Fogey put on his most judicial manner) "the extra inches must tell. For because real ethics resides not in rules but in principles, obedience to the letter may mean falsity to the spirit, if the circumstances that dictated the rules have changed. This is not casuistry. 'T is a concept not to be found in Panaetius or Cicero or the Jesuit Fathers. It means that we are not to wear our boyhood's waistcoats, but to be measured for manhood's. Tight-lacing is bad for the spiritual circulation. 'Get rid of the Hebrew old clo', cried that curious Carlyle, the chief dealer in them. Amen, say I: but do not let us therefore go naked. And since we have stumbled upon 'Sartor Resartus,' permit me a comparison in keeping. I once saw a tailor measuring the boys in a charity school. He drew a chalk line five feet up a wall, and dividing the upper part of the line by horizontal chalk-marks, stood the boys beside it, one after another, and according to the chalk-mark which the crown of the unfortunate creature's head grazed, Master Snip called out 'Fours,' 'Ones,' 'Fives.' Fat boys or lean boys, big-bodied or big-legged, narrow-chested or broad-shouldered, 't was all ones--or twos--to him.