sociologists are in the habit of assuming, and this initial
motive is rarely if ever absent from the conduct of well-mannered
persons at any stage of the later development. Manners, we are
told, are in part an elaboration of gesture, and in part they are
symbolical and conventionalised survivals representing former
acts of dominance or of personal service or of personal contact.
In large part they are an expression of the relation of status,
-- a symbolic pantomime of mastery on the one hand and of
subservience on the other. Wherever at the present time the
predatory habit of mind, and the consequent attitude of mastery
and of subservience, gives its character to the accredited scheme
of life, there the importance of all punctilios of conduct is
extreme, and the assiduity with which the ceremonial observance
of rank and titles is attended to approaches closely to the ideal
set by the barbarian of the quasi-peaceable nomadic culture. Some
of the Continental countries afford good illustrations of this
spiritual survival. In these communities the archaic ideal is
similarly approached as regards the esteem accorded to manners as
a fact of intrinsic worth.

Decorum set out with being symbol and pantomime and with having
utility only as an exponent of the facts and qualities
symbolised; but it presently suffered the transmutation which
commonly passes over symbolical facts in human intercourse.
Manners presently came, in popular apprehension, to be possessed
of a substantial utility in themselves; they acquired a
sacramental character, in great measure independent of the facts
which they originally prefigured. Deviations from the code of
decorum have become intrinsically odious to all men, and good
breeding is, in everyday apprehension, not simply an adventitious