Many a
gentleman of the old school has been provoked to remark
regretfully upon the under-bred manners and bearing of even the
better classes in the modern industrial communities; and the
decay of the ceremonial code -- or as it is otherwise called, the
vulgarisation of life -- among the industrial classes proper has
become one of the chief enormities of latter-day civilisation in
the eyes of all persons of delicate sensibilities. The decay
which the code has suffered at the hands of a busy people
testifies -- all depreciation apart -- to the fact that decorum
is a product and an exponent of leisure class life and thrives in
full measure only under a regime of status.
The origin, or better the derivation, of manners is no doubt, to
be sought elsewhere than in a conscious effort on the part of the
well-mannered to show that much time has been spent in acquiring
them. The proximate end of innovation and elaboration has been
the higher effectiveness of the new departure in point of beauty
or of expressiveness. In great part the ceremonial code of
decorous usages owes its beginning and its growth to the desire
to conciliate or to show good-will, as anthropologists and
sociologists are in the habit of assuming, and this initial
motive is rarely if ever absent from the conduct of well-mannered
persons at any stage of the later development.
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