Wherever at the present time the predatory habit of mind, and the
consequent attitude of mastery and of subservience, gives its character
to the accredited scheme of life, there the importance of all punctilios
of conduct is extreme, and the assiduity with which the ceremonial
observance of rank and titles is attended to approaches closely to the
ideal set by the barbarian of the quasi-peaceable nomadic culture. Some
of the Continental countries afford good illustrations of this spiritual
survival. In these communities the archaic ideal is similarly approached
as regards the esteem accorded to manners as a fact of intrinsic worth.

Decorum set out with being symbol and pantomime and with having utility
only as an exponent of the facts and qualities symbolised; but it
presently suffered the transmutation which commonly passes over
symbolical facts in human intercourse. Manners presently came, in
popular apprehension, to be possessed of a substantial utility in
themselves; they acquired a sacramental character, in great measure
independent of the facts which they originally prefigured. Deviations
from the code of decorum have become intrinsically odious to all
men, and good breeding is, in everyday apprehension, not simply an
adventitious mark of human excellence, but an integral feature of
the worthy human soul. There are few things that so touch us with
instinctive revulsion as a breach of decorum; and so far have we
progressed in the direction of imputing intrinsic utility to the
ceremonial observances of etiquette that few of us, if any, can
dissociate an offence against etiquette from a sense of the substantial
unworthiness of the offender. A breach of faith may be condoned, but a
breach of decorum can not. "Manners maketh man."

None the less, while manners have this intrinsic utility, in the
apprehension of the performer and the beholder alike, this sense of the
intrinsic rightness of decorum is only the proximate ground of the vogue
of manners and breeding. Their ulterior, economic ground is to be sought
in the honorific character of that leisure or non-productive employment
of time and effort without which good manners are not acquired. The
knowledge and habit of good form come only by long-continued use.
Refined tastes, manners, habits of life are a useful evidence of
gentility, because good breeding requires time, application and expense,
and can therefore not be compassed by those whose time and energy are
t