CHAPTER V 



The Tyranny of Clothes 



" Give the tinkers and cobblers their presents again and learn 

 to live of yourself." 



Few enjoy a less sensational and more tranquil life than 

 ours. Weeks pass, and but for the visits of the kindly 

 steamer, and the passing of others at intervals, there is 

 naught of the great world seen or experienced. A strange 

 sail brings out the whole population, staring and curious. 

 Rare is the luxury of living when life is unconstrained, un- 

 fettered by conventionalities and the comic parade of the 

 fashions. The real significance of freedom here is realised. 

 What matters it that London decrees a crease down the 

 trouser legs if those garments are but of well-bleached blue 

 dungaree ? The spotless shirt, how paltry a detail when a 

 light singlet is the only wear? Of what trifling worth 

 dapper boots to feet made leathery by contact with the 

 clean, crisp, oatmeal-coloured sand. Here is no fetish about 

 clothes ; little concern for what we shall eat or what we 

 shall drink. The man who has to observe the least of the 

 ordinances of style knows not liberty. He is a slave ; his 

 dress bewrayeth him and proclaims him base. There may 

 be degrees of baseness. I am abject myself; but whenso- 

 ever I revisit the haunts of men clad in the few light 

 incommoding clothes that rationalism ordains, I rejoice 

 and gloat over the slavery of those who have failed to catch 

 even glimpses of the loveliness of liberty, who are yet 

 afeared of opinion — " that sour-breathed hag." How can a 

 man with hoop-like collar, starched to board-like texture, 

 cutting his jowl and sawing each side of his neck, be free ? 

 He may rejoice because he is a very lord among creation, 



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