This led me to make some remarks the next morning on the manners of well-bred and ill-bred people.

I began,—­The whole essence of true gentle-breeding (one does not like to say gentility) lies in the wish and the art to be agreeable.  Good-breeding is surface-Christianity.  Every look, movement, tone, expression, subject of discourse, that may give pain to another is habitually excluded from conversational intercourse.  This is the reason why rich people are apt to be so much more agreeable than others.

—­I thought you were a great champion of equality,—­said the discreet and severe lady who had accompanied our young friend, the Latin Tutor’s daughter.

I go politically for equality,—­I said,—­and socially for the quality.

Who are the “quality,”—­said the Model, etc., in a community like ours?

I confess I find this question a little difficult to answer,—­I said.  —­Nothing is better known than the distinction of social ranks which exists in every community, and nothing is harder to define.  The great gentlemen and ladies of a place are its real lords and masters and mistresses; they are the quality, whether in a monarchy or a republic; mayors and governors and generals and senators and ex-presidents are nothing to them.  How well we know this, and how seldom it finds a distinct expression!  Now I tell you truly, I believe in man as man, and I disbelieve in all distinctions except such as follow the natural lines of cleavage in a society which has crystallized according to its own true laws.  But the essence of equality is to be able to say the truth; and there is nothing more curious than these truths relating to the stratification of society.

Of all the facts in this world that do not take hold of immortality, there is not one so intensely real, permanent, and engrossing as this of social position,—­as you see by the circumstances that the core of all the great social orders the world has seen has been, and is still, for the most part, a privileged class of gentlemen and ladies arranged in a regular scale of precedence among themselves, but superior as a body to all else.

Nothing but an ideal Christian equality, which we have been getting farther away from since the days of the Primitive Church, can prevent this subdivision of society into classes from taking place everywhere,—­in the great centres of our republic as much as in old European monarchies.  Only there position is more absolutely hereditary,—­here it is more completely elective.

—­Where is the election held? and what are the qualifications? and who are the electors?—­said the Model.