Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/388



to our treatment of another topic in the last we remarked that, in the course of the last twenty-five years, the period during which our wealth has so notably increased, there had been a great and wide-spread deterioration in our manners and in the tone of our society. This opinion has been disputed with some resentment, and with so much ability and particularity, and also with so much plausibility, by "The Nation," that we shall give some of our reasons for a judgment which was not hastily formed, or passed without a full appreciation of its gravity. And, by-the-bye, we shall say that "The Nation" is making obsolete, in a style worthy of all admiration, the question Why have we no "Saturday Reviews?" which was asked so often during the last ten or fifteen years, and which Mr. Grant White once undertook to answer in. The position of our challenger may be briefly, but, we believe, fairly stated thus: Americans now are more intelligent, more "humanitarian," much richer, less provincial, more urban, less rustic than their fathers were; they used to chase greased pigs on Thanksgiving day, skate and slide down hill in Winter, fire at a mark on the Fourth of July, go to quilting parties, and corn huskings, and "dances;" whereas now they trot horses, smoke, go to the theatre, attend lyceum lectures, see picture galleries, play the pianoforte, and read novels; they have seen more, read more, and mixed more with people of other "nationalities," and therefore the national character has become less narrow and provincial, has been raised and dignified, and, with this elevation, manners have also risen. But there has been a change (which is supposed by our challenger to be that which we had in mind), to wit: our manners have become less ceremonious less punctilious, less elaborate, less ruled by etiquette than those of our fathers, and this change is timely, fitting, and for the better.

We meet this latter assumption by at once denying it and setting it aside as impertinent to the issue. According to all the information that we can obtain upon the subject, which accords with our remembrance of what was passing away in our youth, the intercourse of society here is more ceremonious, more formal, more regulated by etiquette now-a-days than it was in the same sets or circles in the days of our fathers. But whether this is true or not, the matter is entirely from the purpose. Our assertion was, not that we are less ceremonious and less punctilious than our fathers were, but that we are less courteous, less deferential to age and to weakness, less careful in the suppression of selfishness, coarser in our pleasures, and more grossly material in all our views of life. And as to ceremony, punctilio and etiquette, let us remove them entirely from present consideration by saying that should they disappear we should not be among their mourners; the less we have of them the better, so long as they do not take with them their masters, courtesy and true politeness.

The fatal defect in the argument of "The Nation" is that its keystone is an assumption, which is not only without warrant, but directly at variance with all testimony, and with the experience of every man of wide observation; the assumption that true politeness, delicacy of sentiment, high moral tone—in short, what the ancient Romans called boni mores (which includes