112 MANNERS AND FASHION. 



tions from excess of restriction were achieved by numbers, 

 bound together by a common creed or a common political 

 faith. What remained undone while there were but indivi- 

 dual schismatics or rebels, was effected when there came 

 to be many acting m concert. It is tolerably clear that 

 these earliest instalments of freedom could not have been 

 obtained in any other way ; for so long as the feeling of 

 personal independence was weak and the rule strong, there 

 could never have been a sufficient number of separate dis- 

 sentients to produce the desired results. Only in these 

 later times, during which the secular and spiritual controls 

 have been growing less coercive, and the tendency towards 

 individual liberty greater, has it become possible for smaller 

 and smaller sects and parties to fight against established 

 creeds and laws ; until now men may safely stand even 

 alone in their antagonism. 



The failure of individual nonconformity to customs, as 

 above illustrated, suggests that an analogous series of 

 changes may have to be gone through in this case also. It 

 is true that the lex non scripta differs from the lex scripta 

 in this, that, being unwritten, it is more readily altered ; 

 and that it has, from time to time, been quietly ameliorated. 

 Nevertheless, we shall find that the analogy holds substan- 

 tially good. For in this case, as in the others, the essen- 

 tial revolution is not the substituting of any one set of 

 restraints for any other, but the limiting or abolishing the 

 authority which prescribes restraints. Just as the funda- 

 mental change inaugurated by the Reformation, was not a 

 superseding of one creed by another, but an ignoring of 

 the arbiter who before dictated creeds — -just as the funda- 

 mental change which Democracy long ago commenced, 

 was not from this jDarticular law to. that, but from the 

 despotism of one to the freedom of all ; so, the paralled 

 change yet to be wrought out in this su23plementary gov- 

 ernment of which we are treating, is not the replacing of 



