atively
insisted on as required evidences of a reputable degree of leisure. It
is worth while to remark that all that class of ceremonial observances
which are classed under the general head of manners hold a more
important place in the esteem of men during the stage of culture
at which conspicuous leisure has the greatest vogue as a mark of
reputability, than at later stages of the cultural development. The
barbarian of the quasi-peaceable stage of industry is notoriously a more
high-bred gentleman, in all that concerns decorum, than any but the very
exquisite among the men of a later age. Indeed, it is well known, or
at least it is currently believed, that manners have progressively
deteriorated as society has receded from the patriarchal stage. Many a
gentleman of the old school has been provoked to remark regretfully upon
the under-bred manners and bearing of even the better classes in the
modern industrial communities; and the decay of the ceremonial code--or
as it is otherwise called, the vulgarisation of life--among the
industrial classes proper has become one of the chief enormities
of latter-day civilisation in the eyes of all persons of delicate
sensibilities. The decay which the code has suffered at the hands of a
busy people testifies--all depreciation apart--to the fact that decorum
is a product and an exponent of leisure class life and thrives in full
measure only under a regime of status.

The origin, or better the derivation, of manners is no doubt, to
be sought elsewhere than in a conscious effort on the part of the
well-mannered to show that much time has been spent in acquiring them.
The proximate end of innovation and elaboration has been the
higher effectiveness of the new departure in point of beauty or of
expressiveness. In great part the ceremonial code of decorous usages
owes its beginning and its growth to the desire to conciliate or to
show good-will, as anthropologists and sociologists are in the habit
of assuming, and this initial motive is rarely if ever absent from the
conduct of well-mannered persons at any stage of the later development.
Manners, we are told, are in part an elaboration of gesture, and in part
they are symbolical and conventionalised survivals representing former
acts of dominance or of personal service or of personal contact. In
large part they are an expression of the relation of status,--a symbolic
pantomime of mastery on the one hand and of subservience on the other.