Friends in Council | Page 7

described before. There was scarcely any conversation
worth noting, until after Milverton had read us the following essay on
Conformity.

CONFORMITY.
The conformity of men is often a far poorer thing than that which
resembles it amongst the lower animals. The monkey imitates from
imitative skill and gamesomeness: the sheep is gregarious, having no
sufficient will to form an independent project of its own. But man often
loathes what he imitates, and conforms to what he knows to be wrong.
It will ever be one of the nicest problems for a man to solve how far he
shall profit by the thoughts of other men, and not be enslaved by them.
He comes into the world, and finds swaddling clothes ready for his
mind as well as his body. There is a vast scheme of social machinery
set up about him; and he has to discern how he can make it work with
him and for him, without becoming part of the machinery himself. In
this lie the anguish and the struggle of the greatest minds. Most sad are
they, having mostly the deepest sympathies, when they find themselves
breaking off from communion with other minds. They would go on, if
they could, with the opinions around them. But, happily, there is
something to which a man owes a larger allegiance than to any human
affection. He would be content to go away from a false thing, or quietly
to protest against it; but in spite of him the strife in his heart breaks into
burning utterance by word or deed.
Few, however, are those who venture, even for the shortest time, into
that hazy world of independent thought, where a man is not upheld by a
crowd of other men's opinions, but where he must find a footing of his
own. Among the mass of men, there is little or no resistance to
conformity. Could the history of opinions be fully written, it would be
seen how large a part in human proceedings the love of conformity, or
rather the fear of non-conformity, has occasioned. It has triumphed
over all other fears; over love, hate, pity, sloth, anger, truth, pride,
comfort, self-interest, vanity, and maternal love. It has torn down the
sense of beauty in the human soul, and set up in its place little ugly
idols which it compels us to worship with more than Japanese devotion.
It has contradicted Nature in the most obvious things, and been listened
to with abject submission. Its empire has been no less extensive than
deep-seated. The serf to custom points his finger at the slave to
fashion--as if it signified whether it is an old or a new thing which is
irrationally conformed to. The man of letters despises both the slaves of
fashion and of custom, but often runs his narrow career of thought, shut

up, though he sees it not, within close walls which he does not venture
even to peep over.
It is hard to say in what department of human thought and endeavour
conformity has triumphed most. Religion comes to one's mind first; and
well it may when one thinks what men have conformed to in all ages in
that matter. If we pass to art, or science, we shall see there too the
wondrous slavery which men have endured--from puny fetters,
moreover, which one stirring thought would, as we think, have burst
asunder. The above, however, are matters not within every one's
cognisance; some of them are shut in by learning or the show of it; and
plain "practical" men would say, they follow where they have no
business but to follow. But the way in which the human body shall be
covered is not a thing for the scientific and the learned only: and is
allowed on all hands to concern, in no small degree, one half at least of
the creation. It is in such a simple thing as dress that each of us may
form some estimate of the extent of conformity in the world. A wise
nation, unsubdued by superstition, with the collected experience of
peaceful ages, concludes that female feet are to be clothed by crushing
them. The still wiser nations of the west have adopted a swifter mode
of destroying health, and creating angularity, by crushing the upper part
of the female body. In such matters nearly all people conform. Our
brother man is seldom so bitter against us, as when we refuse to adopt
at once his notions of the infinite. But even religious dissent were less
dangerous and more respectable than dissent in dress. If you want to
see what men will do in the way of conformity, take a European hat for
your subject of meditation. I dare say there are twenty-two millions of
people at this minute each