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