ch has
passed through the mill will certainly have been stamped by it. And
here, as in the German military service, it is really the whole nation.
When I spoke just now of paterfamilias and his _entourage_ I did not
mean to limit the statement to him. The young unmarried men go to
church; the gay bachelors, the irresponsible members of society. (That
last epithet must be taken with a grain of allowance. No one in England
is irresponsible, that perhaps is the shortest way of describing the
country. Every one is free and every one is responsible. To say what it
is people are responsible to is of course a great extension of the
question: briefly, to social expectation, to propriety, to morality, to
"position," to the classic English conscience, which is, after all, such
a considerable affair.)

The way in which the example of the more comfortable classes imposes
itself upon the less comfortable may of course be noticed in smaller
matters than church-going; in a great many matters which it may seem
trivial to mention. If one is bent upon observation nothing, however, is
trivial. So I may cite the practice of keeping the servants out of the
room at breakfast. It is the fashion, and so, apparently, through the
length and breadth of England, every one who has the slightest
pretension to standing high enough to feel the way the social breeze is
blowing conforms to it. It is awkward, unnatural, troublesome for those
at table, it involves a vast amount of leaning and stretching, of
waiting and perambulating, and it has just that vice against which, in
English history, all great movements have been made--it is arbitrary.
But it flourishes for all that, and all genteel people, looking into
each other's eyes with the desperation of gentility, agree to endure it
for gentility's sake. Another arbitrary trifle is the custom of
depriving the unhappy visitor of a napkin at luncheon. When it is
observed that the English luncheon differs from dinner only in being
several degrees more elaborate and copious, and that in the London
atmosphere it is but common charity, at any moment, to multiply your
guest's opportunities if not for ablution at least for a "dry polish,"
it will be perceived that such eccentricities are the very wantonness
and pedantry of fashion. But, as I say, they flourish, and they form
part of an immense body of prescriptive usages, to which a society
possessing in the largest manner, both by temperament and education, the