the service of faith.

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. Civilized
selfishness is worse also in that it has let go of better things; it is
not in progress towards a higher plane of life, but has turned its back
upon ideals and is slipping on the down-grade without a check. We can
see the complete expression of life without conventions in the
unrestraint of "hooliganism" with us, and its equivalents in other
countries. In this we observe the characteristic product of bringing up
without either religion, or conventions, or teaching in good manners
which are inseparable from religion. We see the demoralization of the
very forces which make both the strength and the we