re restraints imposed by the
circumstances of these elder lands, their necessity more than their
choice, which must still at first sight appear forbidding and superfluous
to the inhabitant of a new one. The rigid barriers of ceremony; the
appearance of studied isolation and exclusiveness; the monotonous movement
of the great social machine, organized to its minutest details, and
regulated through all its processes; these at first may lead the visitor
from the New World to suppose that he has fallen upon some region of
persevering formality, where all is frost and show, perpetual glitter and
unmeaning barrenness. But pierce these formal barriers of etiquette,
dissolve by the requisite appliances this superficial frost-work of the
English circles, and none, it is believed, will have any just reason to
complain of coldness and reserve. By the social barriers spoken of, are
not meant the distinctions of rank in European society, or the
conventional observances by which they are guarded, for these do not
constitute in fact the points of repulsion by which a stranger is apt to
be encountered. Still less do they mean those mental habits of suspicion,
mystery and indirectness, which may infect communities as well as
individuals. For these there is neither extenuation nor excuse. Rousseau
has finely said: 'Le premier pas vers le vice est de mettre du mystere aux
actions innocentes; et quiconque aime a se cacher, a tot ou tard raison de
se cacher. Un seul precepte de morale peut tenir lieu de tous les autres,
c'est celui-ci: Ne fais, ni ne dis jamais rien que tu ne veuilles que tout
le monde voie et entende. J'ai toujours regarde comme le plus estimable
des hommes ce Romain qui voulait que sa maison fut construite de maniere
qu'on vit tout ce qui s'y faisait.' Whether the Englishman would be the
first or the last to submit himself to this crucial test of _living in a
transparent house_, we do not feel called upon to decide. The barriers, of
which some justification has been attempted, are merely those formal
observances by which society aims to protect itself from the intrusion of
the unworthy and designing; which all must perceive to be in some degree
necessary, even to personal independence; and which common-sense teaches
us must be of greater extent and more rigorous application in a crowded
capital than a country village, in an English Almacks than an American
drawing-room. No one will deny that these barriers are high and stric