HABIT. 121 



horses, seem to be maclaines almost pure and simple, un- 

 cloubtingly, unhesitatingly doing from minute to minute the 

 duties they have been taught, and giving no sign that the 

 possibility of an alternative ever suggests itself to their 

 mind. Men grown old in prison have asked to be read- 

 mitted after being once set free. In a railroad accident to 

 a travelling menagerie in the United States some time in 

 1884, a tiger, whose cage had broken open, is said to have 

 emerged, but presently crept back again, as if too much 

 bewildered by his new responsibilities, so that he was with- 

 out difficulty secured. 



Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of.sociej:^, It s mos t 

 precio us conservat ive a gent . It alone is what keeps us all 

 within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of 

 fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor. It alone j 

 prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life from ) 

 being deserted by those brought up to tread therein. It 

 keeps the fisherman and the deck-hand at sea through the 

 winter ; it holds the miner in his darkness, and nails the 

 countryman to his log-cabin and his lonely farm through 

 all the months of snow ; it protects us from invasion by the 

 natives of the desert and the frozen zone. It dooms us all '•, 

 to fight out the battle of life upon the lines of our nurture '' 

 or our early choice, and to make the best of a pursuit that ' 

 disagrees, because there is no other for which we are fitted, 

 and it is too late to begin again. It kee]3S difi'erent social 

 strata from mixing. Already at the age of twenty-five you 

 see the professional mannerism settling down on the young 

 commercial traveller, on the young doctor, on the young 

 minister, on the young counsellor-at-law. You see the little 

 lines of cleavage running througii the character, the tricks 

 of thought, the prejudices, the ways of the ' shop,' in a 

 word, from which the man can by-and-by no more escape 

 than his coat-sleeve can suddenly fall into a new set of s 

 folds. On the whole, it is best he should not escape. It , 

 is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, ; 

 the character has set like plaster, and will never soften \ 

 again, .. ^ . - ^ 



If the period between twentj^ and thirty is the critical 

 one in the formation of intellectual and professional habits, 



