Many of our correspondents ask us to define what is meant by the
terms "good society" and "bad society." They say that they read in
the newspapers of the "good society" in New York and Washington
and Newport, and that it is a record of drunkenness, flirtation,
bad manners and gossip, backbiting, divorce, and slander. They
read that the fashionable people at popular resorts commit all
sorts of vulgarities, such as talking aloud at the opera, and
disturbing their neighbors; that young men go to a dinner, get
drunk, and break glasses; and one ingenuous young girl remarks,
"We do not call that good society in Atlanta."

Such a letter might have been written to that careful chronicler
of "good society" in the days of Charles II., old Pepys of courtly
fame. The young maiden of Hertfordshire, far from the Court, might
well have thought of Rochester and such "gay sparks," and the
ladies who threw glasses of wine at them, as not altogether
well-bred, nor entitled to admission into "good society." We
cannot blame her.

It is the old story. Where, too, as in our land, pleasure and
luxury rule a certain set who enjoy no tradition of good manners,
the contradiction in terms is the more apparent. Even the external
forms of respect to good manners are wanting. No such overt
vulgarity, for instance, as talking aloud at the opera will ever
be endured in London, because a powerful class of really well-born
and well-bred people will hiss it down, and insist on the quiet
which music, of all other things, demands. That is what we mean by
a tradition of good manners.

In humbler society, we may say as in the household of a Scotch