106 MANNERS AND FASHION. 



iu this, that however useful, and needful even, they origi- 

 sally were, they not only in the end cease to be so, but be- 

 come detrimental. While humanity is growing, they con- 

 tinue fixed ; daily get more mechanical and unvital ; and 

 by and by tend to strangle what they before preserved. 

 It is not simply that they become corrupt and fail to act 

 they become obstructions. Old forms of government finally 

 grow so ojipressive, that they must be thrown off even at 

 the risk of reigns of terror. Old creeds end in being dead 

 formulas, which no longer aid but distort and arrest the 

 g^eneral mind; while the State-churches administering them, 

 come to be instruments for subsidizing conservatism and 

 repressing progress. Old schemes of education, incarnated 

 in public schools and colleges, continue filling the heads of 

 new generations with what has become relatively useless 

 knowledge, and, by consequence, excluding knowledge 

 which is useful. Not an organization of any kind — politi- 

 cal, religious, literary, philanthropic — but what, by its ever- 

 multiplying regulations, its accumulating wealth, its yearly 

 addition of officers, and the creeping into it of patronage 

 and party feeling, eventually loses its original spirit, and 

 sinks into a mere lifeless mechanism, worked with a view 

 to private ends — a mechanism which not merely fails of its 

 first purpose, but is a positive hindrance to it. 



Thus is it, too, with social usages. We read of the Chi- 

 nese that they have " ponderous ceremonies transmitted 

 from time immemorial," which make social intercourse a 

 burden. The court forms prescribed by monarchs for their 

 own exaltation, have, in all times and places, ended in con- 

 suming the comfort of their lives. And so the artificial 

 observances of the dining-room and saloon, in proportion 

 as they are many and strict, extinguish that agreeable com- 

 munion which they were originally intended to secure. 

 The dislike with which peoj^le commonly speak of society 

 that is " formal," and " stifi*," and " ceremonious," implies 



