Page:Samuel F. Batchelder - Bits of Harvard History (1924).pdf/344

 to be coming true. He might have added that this same tyranny would also gradually destroy that other fine flower of spontaneous self-expression which gives color and zest to daily life.

For by the same token that is what has eventuated. Every man now smothers his own natural impulses and preferences, in the desire to conform to a conventionalized type. Like an animal with protective coloration, he creeps through the world only too happy to escape observation. His constant terror is to be considered “queer.” He suffers agony if forced to wear a straw hat after September fifteenth. He dares not call to the waiter in a restaurant lest other diners should turn and look at him. As for ideas, he finds it safest to let the editor of his paper do his thinking for him, and thus puts his brain in exact alignment with ten thousand others. His garments are restricted to the hues of soot or the different varieties of mud. In a word, the steam-roller of “good form” has obliterated every outstanding point of personality, and crushed the community to a dead level.

While this new Act of Uniformity was being slavishly and even eagerly obeyed in nearly every nook and corner of the country, it was long stoutly withstood in those strong towers of conservatism, the colleges. Not that the tyranny of mass opinion would have lacked for victims there. By what mysterious law of affinity the most