Of Custom, and That We Should Not Easily Change a Received Law

Custom is a violent and treacherous schoolmistress. She, by little and little, slyly and unperceived, slips in the foot of her authority; but having, by this gentle and humble beginning, with the benefit of time, fixed and established herself, she then unmasks a furious and tyrannic face, against which we have no longer the courage or the power so much as to lift up our eyes. We find her effects in every corner: a man brought up in a country where it is custom to wear no breeches will find, the first time he is obliged to wear them, a most ridiculous and uncomfortable thing. Whatever the mind is taught first, it takes as natural — and defends, afterwards, as though it were reason itself speaking.

Travel is useful for this reason above all others: it shows you, in other places, people doing perfectly well — indeed, with every sign of contentment — under customs entirely opposite to your own. The Greek who had been told that Persians burned their dead would recoil in horror. The Persian who learned that Greeks buried theirs in earth would feel the same. Neither practice is, in itself, superior. Each feels natural to those who have always done it, and barbaric to those who have not.

“The laws of conscience, which we pretend to be derived from nature, proceed from custom; every man, holding in inward veneration the opinions and behaviors approved and received about him, cannot, without remorse, depart from them.”

And yet — and here I must part from those who would use this observation as an argument for change — the fact that laws are founded in custom rather than in nature is not by itself a reason to revise them. Laws derive their authority largely from the simple fact of their age and acceptance. A law that is old, even if it is imperfect, has at least been tested; people know how to live within it; the habits it shapes have become, in turn, the habits of persons raised under it. To overturn it is not to reach behind it to some purer principle — it is to leave everyone exposed while the new arrangement proves whether it can do what the old one did.

This is not a counsel of complacency. It is a counsel of humility. The reformer who tears down the house because the kitchen is poorly placed will find, having demolished it, that he cannot build a better one — and that his family is in the meantime sleeping in the rain. The man who cannot tolerate imperfection in the law will, in the end, leave us all without law. I would rather endure a bad law than live through the violence and uncertainty that attends the unmaking of one.