CHAPTER XII.
MANNERS.
"Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each--once--a stroke of genius or of love, now repeated and hardened into usage."-- EMERSON.
The late Queen Victoria had a profound sense of the importance of manners and of certain conventionalities, and the singular gift of common sense, which stood for so much in her, stands also for the significance of those things on which she laid so much stress.
Conventionality has a bad name at present, and manners are on the decline, this is a fact quite undisputed.

As to conventionalities it is assumed that they represent an artificial and hollow code, from the pressure of which all, and especially the young, should be emancipated.
And it may well be that there is something to be said in favour of modifying them--in fact it must be so, for all human things need at times to be revised and readapted to special and local conditions.

To attempt to enforce the same code of conventions on human society in different countries, or at different stages of development, is necessarily artificial, and if pressed too far it provokes reaction, and in reaction we almost inevitably go to extreme lengths.

So in reaction against too rigid conventionalities and a social ritual which was perhaps over-exacting, we are swinging out beyond control in the direction of complete spontaneity.

And yet there is need for a code of conventions--for some established defence against the instincts of selfishness which find their way back by a short cut to barbarism if they are not kept in check.
Civilized selfishness leads to a worse kind of barbarism than that of rude and primitive states of society, because it has more resources at its command, as cruelty with refinement has more resources for inflicting pain than cruelty which can only strike hard.