It may occur to the polished reader that well-bred youths know and practise these rules of civility by instinct.  But the best bred man’s ancestors had to learn them, and the rude progenitors of future gentlemen have to learn them.  Can it be said, however, that those deemed well-bred do really know and practise these rules of civility instinctively?  Do they practise them when out of the region of the persons or the community in whose eyes they wish to find approval?  How do they act with Indians, Negroes, or when travelling amongst those to whose good opinion they are indifferent?  In a Kentucky court a witness who had spoken of a certain man as “a gentleman,” was pressed for his reasons, and answered, “If any man goes to his house he sets out the whisky, then goes and looks out of the window.”  It is doubtful if what commonly passes for politeness in more refined regions is equally humanised with that of the Kentuckian so described.  Indeed the only difficulty in the way of such teaching as is here suggested, is the degree to which the words “lady” and “gentleman” have been lowered from their original dignity.

The utilization of the social sentiment as a motive of conduct in the young need not, however, depend on such terms, though these are by no means beyond new moralization in any home or school.  An eminent Englishman told me that he once found his little son pointing an old pistol at his sister.  The ancient pistol was not dangerous, but the action was.  “Had I told him it was dangerous,” he said, “it might only have added spice to the thing, but I said, ’I am surprised.  I thought you were a little gentleman, but that is the most ungentlemanly thing you could do.’  The boy quickly laid aside the pistol, with deep shame.  I have found nothing so restraining for my children as to suggest that any conduct is ungentlemanly or unladylike.”  And let my reader note well the great moral principles in these rules of civility and decent behaviour.  The antithesis of “sinfull” is “manfull.”  Washington was taught that all good conduct was gentlemanly, all bad conduct ill-bred.

It is to be hoped that the time is not far distant when in every school right rules of civility will be taught as a main part of the curriculum.  Something of the kind was done by the late Bronson Alcott, in the school he founded in Boston, Massachusetts, near fifty years ago, for children gathered from the street.  The school was opened every morning with a “conduct lesson,” as it was called.  It will be seen by Miss Elizabeth Peabody’s “Records of a School” that the children crowded to the door before it was, opened in their anxiety not to lose a word of this lesson.  And, rude as most of the children were, this instruction, consisting of questions and answers, gradually did away with all necessity for corporal punishments.

It were a noble task for any competent hand to adapt the Rules given in this volume, and those of the later French work, and still more those of Master Obadiah Walker’s book on “Education,” to the conditions and ideas of our time, for the use of schools.  From the last-named work, that of a Master of University College, Oxford, I will take for my conclusion a pregnant passage.