If the discipline of family life makes for law and order, for the subordination of parts to the whole, and for the prompt recognition of authority; if, in other words, it makes, as in the days of Rome, for citizenship, the rescue of the individual makes for social intercourse, for that temperate and reasoned attitude which begets courtesy.  The modern mother may lack influence and authority; but she speaks more urbanely to her children than her mother spoke to her.  The modern child is seldom respectful, but he is often polite, with a politeness which owes nothing to intimidation.  The harsh and wearisome habit of contradiction, which used to be esteemed a family privilege, has been softened to a judicious dissent.  In my youth I knew several old gentlemen who might, on their death-beds, have laid their hands upon their hearts, and have sworn that never in their whole lives had they permitted any statement, however insignificant, to pass uncontradicted in their presence.  They were authoritative old gentlemen, kind husbands after their fashion, and careful fathers; but conversation at their dinner-tables was not for human delight.

The manners of American officials have been discussed with more or less acrimony, and always from the standpoint of personal experience.  The Custom-House is the centre of attack, and critics for the most part agree that the men whose business it is to “hold up” returning citizens perform their ungracious task ungraciously.  Theirs is rather the attitude of the detective dealing with suspected criminals than the attitude of the public servant impersonally obeying orders.  It is true that even on the New York docks one may encounter civility and kindness.  There are people who assure us that they have never encountered anything else; but then there are people who would have us believe that always and under all circumstances they meet with the most distinguished consideration.  They intimate that there is that in their own demeanour which makes rudeness to them an impossibility.

More candid souls find it hard to account for the crudity of our intercourse, not with officials only, but with the vast world which lies outside our narrow circle of associates.  We have no human relations where we have no social relations; we are awkward and constrained in our recognition of the unfamiliar; and this awkwardness encumbers us in the ordinary routine of life.  A policeman who has been long on one beat, and who has learned to know either the householders or the business men of his locality, is wont to be the most friendly of mortals.  There is something almost pathetic in the value he places upon human relationship, even of a very casual order.  A conductor on a local train who has grown familiar with scores of passengers is no longer a ticket-punching, station-shouting automaton.  He bears himself in friendly fashion towards all travellers, because he has established with some of them a rational foothold