For a youth to prefer death to dishonor is a great and generous ideal, but when this ideal becomes a custom, then the ideal has become an idol. It seems more terrible than the custom of Sati that a young man should kill himself for an ideal at the very threshold of life. But indeed that the human being should hold life cheap in comparison with his ideal has nothing of terror or horror in it; the horror begins when custom enforces such a sacrifice upon the individual who cannot understand or willingly accept it.