America, too, has her ancient manners to remember and respect; but, in the rapid assimilation of new peoples into her economic and social organism, more pressing concerns take up nearly all her time.  The perfection of manners by intensive cultivation of good taste, some believe, would be the greatest aid possible to the moralists who are alarmed over the decadence of the younger generation.  Good taste may not make men or women really virtuous, but it will often save them from what theologians call “occasions of sin.”  We may note, too, that grossness in manners forms a large proportion of the offenses that fanatical reformers foam about.  Besides grossness, there is also the meaner selfishness.  Selfishness is at the polar remove from the worldly manners of the old school, according to which, as Dr. Pusey wrote, others were preferred to self, pain was given to no one, no one was neglected, deference was shown to the weak and the aged, and unconscious courtesy extended to all inferiors.  Such was the “beauty” of the old manners, which he felt consisted in “acting upon Christian principle, and if in any case it became soulless, as apart from Christianity, the beautiful form was there, into which the real life might re-enter.”

As a study of all that is admirable in American manners, and as a guide to behavior in the simplest as well as the most complex requirements of life day by day, whether we are at home or away from it, there can be no happier choice than the present volume.  It is conceived in the belief that etiquette in its broader sense means the technique of human conduct under all circumstances in life.  Yet all minutiae of correct manners are included and no detail is too small to be explained, from the selection of a visiting card to the mystery of eating corn on the cob.  Matters of clothes for men and women are treated with the same fullness of information and accuracy of taste as are questions of the furnishing of their houses and the training of their minds to social intercourse.  But there is no exaggeration of the minor details at the expense of the more important spirit of personal conduct and attitude of mind.  To dwell on formal trivialities, the author holds, is like “measuring the letters of the sign-boards by the roadside instead of profiting by the directions they offer.”  She would have us know also that “it is not the people who make small technical mistakes or even blunders, who are barred from the paths of good society, but those of sham and pretense whose veneered vulgarity at every step tramples the flowers in the gardens of cultivation.”  To her mind the structure of etiquette is comparable to that of a house, of which the foundation is ethics and the rest good taste, correct speech, quiet, unassuming behavior, and a proper pride of dignity.