A country-woman carries a calf each day until the calf is an ox and she can still bear it. Montaigne names the force that trained her: custom, a violent and treacherous schoolmistress who slips her authority in gently, then unmasks a tyrannic face no one has the courage to look at. She forces nature itself. His own perfumed doublet pleases him for three days, then only the bystanders. He sleeps in a tower where the Ave Maria bell shakes the stone; at first the clang is insupportable, then he wakes through it, or does not wake at all. Plato tells a boy that custom is no little thing. Mothers laugh when a child wrings a chicken's neck, and fathers praise a son who cheats at pins or bullies a lackey who cannot answer. Those, Montaigne says, are the seeds of cruelty, tyranny, and treason. Custom prints still deeper on the mind than on the body. A French gentleman blows his nose with his fingers and asks what privilege this excrement has, that we wrap it in fine linen and carry it all day in a pocket. Frequent company makes the gesture familiar. Barbarians, Montaigne concludes, are no more a wonder to us than we are to them.
If travellers would only confer those remote examples with their own, they would see that human reason is a tincture poured equally into every manner. He returns to the catalogue: kings spoken to only through a tube, brides honoured by how many wedding guests lie with them, peoples who drink the pounded dead in wine or count it piety to kill a father at a set age. Pindar calls custom the ruler of the world. A man beaten for striking his father answers that it is the custom of their family, and points to his own son as the next in the line. Another son drags his father through the streets and is told to stop at a certain door, the inherited limit of the outrage. The laws of conscience, which we pretend come from nature, proceed from custom. Cretans, when they would curse a man, prayed the gods to engage him in some ill custom. We suck the posture of the world in with our milk, and whatever sits off the hinges of custom looks as if it sat off the hinges of reason. People bred to liberty call monarchy monstrous; people inured to a king, even after they throw one off, run to make another. Darius cannot hire Greeks to eat their fathers, nor Indians to burn theirs. Use veils from us the true aspect of things.
Montaigne once set out to justify a usage received with absolute authority for many leagues around him. He inquired into its origin and found the foundation so weak that he, whose business was to confirm others, was very near being dissatisfied himself. Take the mask off, and judgment is overthrown, then restored on surer ground. What could be stranger than a people bound to laws they never understood, written in a language they must buy the interpretation of? What more savage than a nation where the office of a judge is bought, and justice may be denied to the man who cannot pay? France lives under two opposite codes: the law of honour that degrades the noble who swallows an affront, and the civil law that punishes with death the man who answers it. A wise man withdraws his soul from the crowd and keeps it free to judge, but in clothes, labour, and life he follows the fashion of the time. Socrates would not save himself by disobedience to a wicked magistrate. The rule of rules is that every one observe the laws of the place wherein he lives. Government is a structure so joined that you cannot stir one brick without the whole body feeling it. Charondas made the man who would abolish an old law or found a new one present himself with a halter about his neck, to be hanged if the people did not approve. Montaigne has a great aversion from novelty, having been an eyewitness of the evils it produced in France.
Those who give the first shock to a state are almost naturally the first overwhelmed in its ruin. They beat the water for another's net. The unity of the monarchy, ripped in her old age by the thing called innovation, opened a rent that let later injuries in. It argues a strange self-love, Montaigne says, to overthrow a public peace in order to plant one's own opinions. The man who follows received forms can plead simplicity; the man who chooses and alters usurps the authority of judging. That consideration kept even his ungoverned youth from loading his shoulders with a science of that weight. Private reason has but a private jurisdiction. Fortune, still, sometimes presents a necessity so urgent that the laws should yield a little. Octavius and Cato would rather see their country at the last extremities than relieve it by innovation. In those last necessities it may be more discreet to stoop and receive the blow than, by opposing without hope of good, to give violence the occasion to trample all under foot. Better to make the laws do what they can, when they cannot do what they would. Agesilaus suspends them for four-and-twenty hours. The Lacedaemonians, forbidden to choose the same man admiral twice, name Aratus to the office and send Lysander as general of the navy. An ambassador, told he may not take away the tablet of a law, is advised only to turn it. Plutarch commends Philopoemen for knowing how to overrule the laws themselves when public necessity required. The tablet is still there. Whether it will be turned, or taken, is not yet decided.
