rather because they must than because they wish. No wonder that
the invited go less from the expectation of pleasure than from fear of
giving offence. The whole thing is a gigantic mistake--an organised
disappointment.

And then note, lastly, that in this case, as in all others, when an
organisation has become effete and inoperative for its legitimate
purpose, it is employed for quite other ones--quite opposite ones. What
is the usual plea put in for giving and attending these tedious
assemblies? "I admit that they are stupid and frivolous enough," replies
every man to your criticisms; "but then, you know, one must keep up
one's connections." And could you get from his wife a sincere answer, it
would be--"Like you, I am sick of these frivolities; but then, we must
get our daughters married." The one knows that there is a profession to
push, a practice to gain, a business to extend: or parliamentary
influence, or county patronage, or votes, or office, to be got:
position, berths, favours, profit. The other's thoughts run upon
husbands and settlements, wives and dowries. Worthless for their
ostensible purpose of daily bringing human beings into pleasurable
relations with each other, these cumbrous appliances of our social
intercourse are now perseveringly kept in action with a view to the
pecuniary and matrimonial results which they indirectly produce.

Who then shall say that the reform of our system of observances is
unimportant? When we see how this system induces fashionable
extravagance, with its entailed bankruptcy and ruin--when we mark how
greatly it limits the amount of social intercourse among the less
wealthy classes--when we find that many who most need to be disciplined
by mixing with the refined are driven away by it, and led into dangerous
and often fatal courses--when we count up the many minor evils it
inflicts, the extra work which its costliness entails on all
professional and mercantile men, the damage to public taste in dress and
decoration by the setting up of its absurdities as standards for
imitation, the injury to health indicated in the faces of its devotees
at the close of the London season, the mortality of milliners and the
like, which its sudden exigencies yearly involve;--and when to all
these we add its fatal sin, that it blights, withers up, and kills that
high enjoyment it professedly ministers to--that enjoyment which is a
chief end of our hard struggling in life to obtain--shall we no