insistence of health officers and doctors, are most to be thanked. Spitting in the streets, at the fireside and in railway carriages, was habitual to many who have completely broken themselves of the vile practice. The aforetime footstool was often a disguised cuspidor. Chewing tobacco, a nasty habit, with its odious accompaniments, also has gone; and Byron chewed as Napoleon spat. Snuff-taking was not nearly so bad in its ancillary consequences; but yet not every one could take his pinch with the elegance of the dandy who tapped the lid of his snuff-box with an air before fingering his superfine rappee. He had many crude followers whose snufftaking had results deplorable.

This victory for decency and cleanliness among the generality is great; and shows what can be done when reason insists upon a necessity and threatens pains and penalties for unsocial neglectfulness. But also it is largely due to an improvement in the standard of living, if not of life, and an increase in real wealth; self-respect being greatly helped by decent and attractive conditions. Whatever the causes of those advantages may be, the Industrial Revolution was a great part of it, with the opening-up of new sources from which raw material is drawn, the development and improvement of machinery, vastly better and speedier means of intercommunication and carriage facilitating distribution. These and other causes have combined to provide some necessities cheaply, and especially the raw and finished stuffs of clothing; so that raggedness is rarely seen, even in districts manifestly very poor; while many a girl who formerly would have been described as of the servant class (there seems to be no such thing as a servant class nowadays) is able to appear as tastefully dressed as My Lady of Mayfair. How they manage it may be a mystery, but there it is. Mean streets now breed many a lass with the delicate air.

This is to the good; though often it is to be feared that bodies must sometimes suffer, being satisfied with little or poor nourishment, to provide the finery adorning them; yet in making the endeavour to improve their appearances tastefully-an endeavour in which the girls have left the youths of their class far behind them-something more than their own individual

outward show is effected. The indirect results are, and are bound to be, considerable. Even if their fathers and mothers cling to the accustomed dinginess of attire and environment, as often is not the case, the brightness these girls bring to their dismal surroundings, at least in London and the south of England, is bound to react eventually to the betterment of those conditions. Much of this, of course, does not so surely apply to such disastrous districts as the Black Country and some of the harsh manufacturing centres of the North, where the call and response to beauty are necessarily very restricted; but throughout our islands, as throughout the civilised world where fashion is an influence and power, there has been a marked improvement in the average appearance of the people.

Possibly the wide uniformity of style resulting is not good, for it has meant the final disappearance of many interesting local and national costumes. In Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, as also in Brittany, except for the local coif, and that too is vanishing, the national costume, once prevalent, has almost entirely gone (though let us not forget to acknowledge the eagerness of certain southern-born visitors to Scotland to wear the kilt and anybody's tartan). It is hopeless to think of recovering such a possession; as most attempts of the kind-the restoration of local folk-dancing is pretty well the only exception-have ended in failure after a temporary affectation. Even the Irish will not learn Irish. The attempts made to restore the incidents of nationality, when once they have been lost, generally have lacked reality; but still we can deplore the fact of an unenterprising uniformity, and, looking through the pages of these volumes, can see how stimulating were the alterations in modes during the last hundred years. Until recently, you could easily tell Jack from his master, and Joan from her mistress, as in these days, out of doors at any rate and with the women especially, often you cannot do. But in those days rank and class were strictly delimited. Social distinctions were closely observed. There was a difference in the quality of dress, as well as in the manner of wearing it, that was well marked, as to some extent of course is also the case now; but the cause of the difference

nowadays resides in the individual purse and pocketbook. Any style is purchasable with cash; but formerly it was an affair over which established custom and an abiding sense of relative position ruled. Jack did not dream of being as good as his master, and both of them knew it.

This tendency to similarity, to uniformity, in material quality as well as in style, is secondarily due-the first cause is commercial - to the open-air life we lead, and the jolly pursuit of games. With the progress of sport, especially of team-work in other countries, this tendency to uniformity must spread. The writers of these volumes recognise this truth: for they point out what, with the vogue of Paris much in mind, is often overlooked; that, particularly in the earlier years of the last century, England led fashion in Europe, and thereby led the world; further, they assert the truth that, despite lip-worship to liberty, fraternity and equality, a truly democratic spirit was established earlier here than elsewhere; and especially long before it prevailed in Germany, where a fussy, stuffy, and conceited Prussian etiquette, generally of elaborately bad manners, has gradually increased and tyrannised.

This obvious decay in the natural German simplicity and kindliness is not of such recent growth as might be imagined, for less than a hundred years ago a woman of the middle classes in Berlin, chancing to meet a countess in any public place, was compelled to seat herself at least six chairs away from her; while as far back as 1798, the young nobles of Pomerania bound themselves by word of honour not to dance with any woman beneath them in rank. That may be taken as a significant example of a stupid inability to bear gentleness gently, which eventually--follow its tendencies and it is clear-brought Prussianism to ruin, as the same tendencies brought catastrophe to the glittering and over-coloured empire of Napoleon the Third.

It was a mistake in conduct, proving an essential vulgarity, which the aristocracy of Great Britain have unaffectedly avoided. With us, prince and typist, duchess and butler, in the due season, may meet and dance together; and each discover an enhanced respect for the other. It would be interesting, if space allowed, to

follow out the parallels between the courts of Louis Napoleon and the ex-Kaiser; as they reveal a similar pomposity and extravagance combined with vulgar loudness; elaborate display and pretence, bombastic parades of troops with boastings; a very stiff arrogant pride, weakened by the accepted intrusion of the demi-monde and the money-bags; truly history is ever repeating itself, but mankind never seems to learn from it. The French Revolution, had its lessons been accepted by the Tsars, might have saved the world from the triumphant brutalities and persistent dangers of Russian Bolshevism. But as it is-so it is; and space does not allow more than this passing reference to the casual and colossal accidents brought and repeated by Time.

Manners are a natural reflex to the modes. Blatancy in the one is sure to stimulate blatancy of the other. Manners make the man; good manners the gentleman; ill-manners, combined with some obvious prosperity, the cad. As the rightly-dressed person is he whose costume is unobtrusive, not calling attention by its carelessness or by its display, so the man of true manners unconsciously avoids drawing notice to himself. Selfreverence, self-control, self-knowledge, and self-sacrifice are the characteristics,' has said Dean Inge. One sees how changes, superficial changes, have come and gone in this concern of manners over the century. Formality, once elaborate, has generally disappeared, and careless familiarity, with kindly simplicity, have replaced it; but the transition from the one habit or practice to the other was not gradual. It had its rapid ups-anddowns, as the fortunes of the nation changed, and politics or war brought a louder expression of feelings.

The ruling families, the landed gentry, those who had inherited an established position and recognised the traditions and honourable responsibilities of their rank and had the means to maintain them, preserved a dignity which even the grand seigneur of the time of Louis XIII could not have outdone. They had character and style; to adopt the modern phrase, they could do things with a gesture. Noblesse oblige was a motto with a recognised meaning, and they practised the ideal that it represents. But still not all was noble even with those of their estate. To youths of good fortune and family position, excesses

were allowed which cast dark shadows on the grandeurs of the period. Drunkenness and other frailties of the flesh were frequent in the best families; and the young blood, at any rate, was permitted a wide indulgence in pleasure and the enforcement of privileges which, looked at through the spectacles of experience, must be recognised as having been odious. The street-jokes of the Mohocks and similar gangs of dissolute young men of leisure; the overturning of old watchmen in their boxes, the cudgelling of innocent passers-by, the worse treatment of women, the wanton destruction of property, such as the wrenching-off of door-knockers and the smashing of railings and windows, the dicing, the wenching, the wanton extravagance, the general viciousness; thank the powers that such are no longer the tolerated enjoyments of golden youth and gentle blood! Generally -at once it can be seen-with all its manifest faults the world has more decency now than it had then. Old Adam is still alive, the seven deadly sins are plentifully practised; but there is not the same flagrant display of vice and animal spirits, and the man in the street is unquestionably kinder than he was at any time earlier.

That is a helpful fact to serve as a standard for spiritual measurements. Manners, when they are dissociated from kindness and consideration to others, cannot be worth much; and in the 'good old days' the downfall and humiliation of others was an unfailing subject for mirth. A tumble in the street caused sides to split. To bait an old woman, to give hot coppers to a blind man, to chase a starved dog or cat with a can tied to its tail, to 'wallop' a horse well, to leave booby-traps of less innocuous design, with elaborate hoaxes and practical jokes, to discover sport in another's disaster, however petty the circumstance might be, were evidence of a careless and cruel spirit which could not really have inspired a noble nature. In that respect there certainly has been improvement.

Possibly the most evident falling-off has been in the familiar opinion of Parliament, which may still be taken as a representative expression of popular manners. It is possible that appearances at present are unfair; but no one, with the greatest assumption of fancy, can pretend that as a pattern and school of manners the House Vol. 250.-No. 495.

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