Custom 



of its home life and the truth of things is upset. 

 Surely there must be a right and a wrong way 

 of eating one's dinner or of setting potatoes, 

 and surely, if any one, " father " or " mother " 

 must know what is right. The elders have always 

 said (and indeed it seems only reasonable) that 

 by this time of day everything has been so thor- 

 oughly worked over that the best methods of 

 ordering our life — food, dress, domestic practices, 

 social habits, etc., have long ago been determined. 

 If so, why these divergencies in the simplest and 

 most obvious matters ? 



And then other things give way. The sacred 

 seeming-universal customs in which we were 

 bred turn out to be only the practices of a small 

 and narrow class or caste ; or they prove to be 

 confined to a very limited locality, and must be 

 left behind when we set out on our travels ; or 

 they belong to the tenets of a feeble religious sect ; 

 or they are just the products of one age in history 

 and no other. And the question forces itself 

 upon us, Are there really no natural boundaries ? 

 has not our life anywhere been founded on reason 

 and necessity, but only on arbitrary habit .'' What 

 is more important than food, yet in what human 

 matter is there more unaccountable divergence of 

 practice ? The Highlander flourishes on oatmeal, 

 which the Sheffield ironworker would rather starve 

 than eat ; the fat snail which the Roman country 

 gentleman once so prized now crawls unmolested 

 in the Gloucestershire peasant's garden ; rabbits 

 are taboo in Germany ; frogs are unspeakable 



207 



