If this be true, then it is only after acquaintance has grown into intimacy, and intimacy has ripened into friendship, that the real communion which men need becomes possible.  A rationally-formed circle must consist almost wholly of those on terms of familiarity and regard, with but one or two strangers.  What folly, then, underlies the whole system of our grand dinners, our “at homes,” our evening parties—­assemblages made up of many who never met before, many others who just bow to each other, many others who though familiar feel mutual indifference, with just a few real friends lost in the general mass!  You need but look round at the artificial expressions of face, to see at once how it is.  All have their disguises on; and how can there be sympathy between masks?  No wonder that in private every one exclaims against the stupidity of these gatherings.  No wonder that hostesses get them up rather because they must than because they wish.  No wonder that the invited go less from the expectation of pleasure than from fear of giving offence.  The whole thing is a gigantic mistake—­an organised disappointment.

And then note, lastly, that in this case, as in all others, when an organisation has become effete and inoperative for its legitimate purpose, it is employed for quite other ones—­quite opposite ones.  What is the usual plea put in for giving and attending these tedious assemblies?  “I admit that they are stupid and frivolous enough,” replies every man to your criticisms; “but then, you know, one must keep up one’s connections.”  And could you get from his wife a sincere answer, it would be—­“Like you, I am sick of these frivolities; but then, we must get our daughters married.”  The one knows that there is a profession to push, a practice to gain, a business to extend:  or parliamentary influence, or county patronage, or votes, or office, to be got:  position, berths, favours, profit.  The other’s thoughts run upon husbands and settlements, wives and dowries.  Worthless for their ostensible purpose of daily bringing human beings into pleasurable relations with each other, these cumbrous appliances of our social intercourse are now perseveringly kept in action with a view to the pecuniary and matrimonial results which they indirectly produce.

Who then shall say that the reform of our system of observances is unimportant?  When we see how this system induces fashionable extravagance, with its entailed bankruptcy and ruin—­when we mark how greatly it limits the amount of social intercourse among the less wealthy classes—­when we find that many who most need to be disciplined by mixing with the refined are driven away by it, and led into dangerous and often fatal courses—­when we count up the many minor evils it inflicts, the extra work which its costliness entails on all professional and mercantile men, the damage to public taste in dress and decoration by the setting up of its absurdities as standards for imitation, the injury to health indicated