ly against us. We have to make up our minds as
to what conventions can survive and fix in some way the high and
low-water marks, for there must be both, the highest that we can attain,
and the lowest that we can accept. All material is not alike; some
cannot take polish at all. It is well if it can be made tolerable; if it
does not fall below that level of manners which are at least the
safeguard of conduct; if it can impose upon itself and accept at least
so much restraint as to make it inoffensive, not aggressively selfish.
Perhaps the low-water mark might be fixed at the remembrance that other
people have rights and the observance of their claims. This would secure
at least the common marks of respect and the necessary conventionalities
of intercourse. For ordinary use the high-water mark might attain to the
remembrance that other people have feelings, and to taking them into
account, and as an ordinary guide of conduct this includes a great deal
and requires training and watchfulness to establish it, even where there
is no exceptional selfishness or bluntness of sense to be overcome. The
nature of an ordinary healthy energetic child, high-spirited and
boisterous, full of a hundred interests of its own, finds the mere
attention to these things a heavy yoke, and the constant self-denial
needed to carry them out is a laborious work indeed.

The slow process of polishing marble has more than one point of
resemblance with the training of manners; it is satisfactory to think
that the resemblance goes further than the process, that as only by
polishing can the concealed beauties of the marble be brought out, so
only in the perfecting of manners will the finer grain of character and
feeling be revealed. Polishing is a process which may reach different
degrees of brilliancy according to the material on which it is
performed; and so in the teaching of manners a great deal depends upon
the quality of the nature, and the amount of expression which it is
capable of acquiring. It is useless to press for what cannot be given,
at the same time it is unfair not to exact the best that every one is
able to give. As in all that has to do with character, example is better
than precept.

But in the matter of manners example alone is by no means enough;
precept is formally necessary, and precept has to be enforced by
exercise. It is necessary because the origin of established
conventionalities is remote; they do not speak for themselves,