not be burdened with their sorrow. The habit
is in striking contrast with the weeping and wailing, the mourning
streamers, the hatbands, plumes, palls, black chargers, and funeral
hearses with which we struggle to stir the envy, if not the hearts of
all beholders!"

In Japan, so we are told, manners are included in the public teaching
of morality. Among our western peoples our public school boys would
deem it strange if a master gave them an hour's instruction in the
correct manner of behaving toward their father and mother or sisters.
Yet such knowledge might be urgently needed and do good here as it
does in Japan where it is counted the most vital instruction of all.
Step by step the Japanese child is led along the course of behavior,
learning how to stand up, sit down, bow, hang up its hat, and how to
think of its parents, brothers and sisters, and of its country. Later
on these lessons are repeated with illustrations from short stories,
and still later by incidents from actual history and the lives of
great men of all countries. Before the end of the course of
instruction is reached all manner of virtues and points of behavior
have been introduced, such as patriotism, cleanliness, and (especially
in the case of girls) the proper way of advancing and retiring,
offering and accepting things, sleeping and eating, visiting,
congratulating and condoling, mourning and holding public meetings. So
the school course continues from year to year, the elementary school
course lasting four years and the secondary course four years more,
and leading the boys and girls up to the study of benevolence, their
duty to ancestors, to other people's property, other people's honor,
other people's freedom, and, finally, to self-discipline, modesty,
dignity, dress, labor, the treatment of animals, and the due relations
of men and women, both of whom are to be regarded equally as "lords"
of creation. From end to end of the long course of training, behavior
rather than knowledge is insisted upon, even down to the tiniest
detail of what our good great-grandmothers valued as deportment.

To such scrupulous deportment and close attention to minuteness of
habit, some objection can be raised, perhaps. "Some men's behavior,"
said Bacon, "is like a verse wherein every syllable is measured," and
he warned us that manners must be like apparel, "not too strait or
point-device, but free for exercise or motion." However, it is better
to err on the sid