HABIT
“Habit a second nature! Habit is ten times nature,” the Duke of Wellington is said to have exclaimed; and the degree to which this is true no one can probably appreciate as well as one who is a veteran soldier himself.
The daily drill and the years of discipline end by fashioning a man completely over again, as to most of the possibilities of his conduct.
“There is a story, which is credible enough, though it may not be true, of a practical joker, who, seeing a discharged veteran carrying home his dinner, suddenly called out, ‘Attention!’ Whereupon the man instantly brought his hands down, and lost his mutton and potatoes in the gutter.
The drill had been thorough, and its effects had become embodied in the man’s nervous structure.”
Riderless cavalry-horses, at many a battle, have been seen to come together and go through their customary evolutions at the sound of the bugle call.
Most trained domestic animals, dogs and oxen, and omnibus- and car-horses, seem to be machines almost pure and simple, undoubtingly, unhesitatingly doing from minute to minute the duties they have been taught, and giving no sign that the possibility of an alternative ever suggests itself to their mind.
Men grown old in prison have asked to be readmitted after being once set free.
In a railroad accident to a traveling menagerie in the United States some time in 1884, a tiger, whose cage had broken open, is said to have emerged, but presently crept back again, as if too much bewildered by his new responsibilities, so that he was without difficulty secured.
Habit is thus the enormous flywheel of society, its most precious conservative agent.
It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor.
It alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life from being deserted by those brought up to tread therein.
It keeps the fisherman and the deck hand at sea through the winter; it holds the miner in his darkness, and nails the countryman to his log cabin and his lonely farm through all the months of snow; it protects us from invasion by the natives of the desert and the frozen zone.
It dooms us all to fight out the battle of life upon the lines of our nurture or our early choice, and to make the best of a pursuit that disagrees, because there is no other for which we are fitted, and it is too late to begin again.
It keeps different social strata from mixing. Already at the age of twenty-five you see the professional mannerism settling down on the young commercial traveler, on the young doctor, on the young minister, on the young counselor at law.
You see the little lines of cleavage running through the character, the tricks of thought, the prejudices, the ways of the “shop,” in a word, from which the man can by and by no more escape than his coat sleeve can suddenly fall into a new set of folds.
On the whole, it is best he should not escape. It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.
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