In private affairs, the same spirit is alike deleterious.  We live as society directs, each according to the standard of our class.  We have a superstitious reverence for custom.  We dress, and eat, and live, in conformity with the Grundy law.  So long as we do this, we are “respectable,” according to class notions.  Thus many rush open-eyed upon misery, for no better excuse than a foolish fear of “the world.”  They are afraid of “what others will say of them;” and, in nine cases out of ten, those who might probably raise the voice of censure, are not the wise or the far-seeing, but much oftener the foolish, the vain, and the short-sighted.

Sir William Temple has said, that “a restlessness in men’s minds to be something that they are not, and to have something that they have not, is the root of all immorality.”  The statement is strictly correct.  It has been attested by universal experience.

Keeping up appearances is one of the greatest social evils of the age.  There is a general effort, more particularly amongst the middle and upper classes, at seeming to be something that they are not.  They put on appearances, live a life of sham, and endeavour to look something superior to what they really are.

“Respectability” is one of the chief aims.  Respectability, regarded in its true sense, is a desirable thing.  To be respected, on right grounds, is an object which every man and woman is justified in obtaining.  But modern respectability consists of external appearances.  It means wearing fine clothes, dwelling in fine houses, and living in fine style.  It looks to the outside,—­to sound, show, externals.  It listens to the chink of gold in the pocket.  Moral worth or goodness forms no part of modern respectability.  A man in these days may be perfectly “respectable,” and yet altogether despicable.

This false and demoralizing habit arises from the overweening estimate which is formed of two things, well enough in their place,—­rank and wealth.  Everybody struggles to rise into some superior class.  The spirit of caste is found as keenly at work among the humblest as among the highest ranks.  At Birmingham, there was a club of workmen with tails to their coats, and another without tails:  the one looked down upon the other.  Cobbett, so felicitous in his nicknames, called his political opponent, Mr. Sadler, “a linendraper.”  But the linendraper also has plenty of people beneath him.  The linendraper looks down on the huckster, the huckster on the mechanic, and the mechanic on the day labourer.  The flunkey who exhibits his calves behind a baron, holds his head considerably higher than the flunkey who serves a brewer.

It matters not at what class you begin, or however low in the social scale, you will find that every man has somebody beneath him.  Among the middling ranks, this sort of exclusiveness is very marked.  Each circle would think it a degradation to mix on familiar terms with the members of the circle beneath it.  In small towns and villages, you will find distinct coteries holding aloof from each other, perhaps despising each other, and very often pelting each other with hard words.  The cathedral towns, generally, have at least six of such distinct classes, ranking one beneath the other.