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 betrayeth him and proclaims him base. There
may be degrees of baseness. I am abject myself; but whensoever 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, and has trousers
shortened by turning up the ninth part of a hair after London vogue,
and may be proud of his laws and legislature, and even of his
legislators, but to the tyrannous edge of his collar he is a slave.
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