as raced so far ahead of mental and spiritual
progress that the world itself is a good many years in advance of the
people who are living in it. Our statesmen ride to Washington in
automobiles and sleeping cars, but they are not vastly preferable to
those who went there in stagecoaches and on horseback. In other words,
there has been considerably more improvement in the vehicles which fill
our highways than there has been in the people who ride in them.

The average man--who is, when all is said and done, the most important
person in the state--has stood still while the currents of science and
invention have swept past him. He has watched the work of the world pass
into the keeping of machines, shining miracles of steel and electricity,
and has forgot himself in worshipping them. Now he is beginning to
realize that it is much easier to make a perfect machine than it is to
find a perfect man to put behind it, and that man himself, even at his
worst (and that is pretty bad) is worth more than anything else in the
scheme of created things.

This tremendous change in environment resulting from the overwhelming
domination of machinery has brought about a corresponding change in
manners. For manners consist, in the main, of adapting oneself to one's
surroundings. And the story of courtesy is the story of evolution.

It is interesting to run some of our conventions back to their origin.
Nearly every one of them grew out of a practical desire for lessening
friction or making life pleasanter. The first gesture of courtesy was,
no doubt, some form of greeting by which one man could know another as a
friend and not an enemy. They carried weapons then as habitually as they
carry watches to-day and used them as frequently, so that when a man
approached his neighbor to talk about the prospects of the sugar or
berry crop he held out his right hand, which was the weapon hand, as a
sign of peace. This eventually became the handshake. Raising one's hat
is a relic of the days of chivalry when knights wore helmets which they
removed when they came into the house, both because they were more
comfortable without them and because it showed their respect for the
ladies, whom it was their duty to serve. And nearly every other ceremony
which has lasted was based on common sense. "Etiquette," as Dr. Brown
has said, "with all its littlenesses and niceties, is founded upon a
central idea of right and wrong."

The word "courtesy" itself did not c