New-York tribune. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1866-1924, 1888-07-01
DENOCRACY IND GOOD MANNEA

The fact has often been remarked that all
our words descriptive of fine manners are de-
rived from, moparchial associations. We say
of man that he looks every inch a king and
never every inch president We speak of a
really princoly bearing, but not Of truly
congressional bearing. We describe man as
one of natures noblemen, but we never say
that nature fashioned him to be a member Of
The Legislature. The word county, which is
used TO describe the most elegant manners,
sufficiently indicates the source Of these ideas.
Courts have been the home of good manners
in those ages when the common people had
no time TO cultivate them, and were not sup
posed to have any right to them. But the
progress of democracy has changed all that.
Intelligence and certain share Of leisure
have become the property Of the mass of man
kind. and the result has been a diffusion of
good manners commensurate with the spread
Of education and the growth of the individual
in political equality.
But the old ideas are still cherished by
many, even in a country where the daily
refutatiOn Of them is so complete as in the
United States President Eliot, Of Harvard,
in his recent address before the Phi Beta
Kappa, devoted considerable attention to COM
batting the notion that democracy is not
favorable TO the permanence of families and
to the transmission Of culture and refinement.
He appeals to the catalogues Of Harvard and
Washington and Lee University to prove that
the college graduate is almost certain to send
his son to college, thus securing that perpetual
ton Of education which, with the continuance
of physical vgor, he pronOunces to be essen
tial TO family permanence. The fiXity Of in
comes, which is more important for these ends
than great wealth, is secured to remarkable
degree, he thinks, under the American de-
mocracy through the great development of
corporations affording means whereby small
fortunes can he made to produce better and
suer return than their owners could hope for
from individual effort. The result of the many
agencies at work for the diffusion Of educa-
ton ana for the promotion of physical we'll
being is that the average of our people in
Wig n and intelligence is high Our experience
shows, President Eliot concludes, that
neither generations of privileged ancestors
nor large inherited possessions arc necessary
to the making Of lady or gentleman" and
he adds, as the result of his own observations
in which every person who has travelled al
al will probably second him, that there is g 4
larger proportion of ladies and gentlemen in
the United states than in any other coun-
try"
This seems to be only logical sequence of
all the tendencies of life in democracy. In
a society founded upon class distinctions
everyb ody as some one has said must look up
or down, and it is hard for the nan who does
either to be wholly gentleman. Equality is
the natural parent Of good manners inasmuch
as nothing so surely begets respect for the
rights and feelings of others as respect for
our own. The man who must be seryile in
one relation Of life will hardly BE truly polite
and kind in others, any more than the man who
is born to the right to be overbearing in all.
The consciousness Of personal independence,
which reaches its highest development in a
democracy ought to tend, and undoubtedly
does tend, not TO arrogance and self-assertion,
but to the recognition OF the same independence
and equality for others which we claim for our
selves. In this way the tendency Of democracy
will surely be, as the world grows older,
toward the production Of higher type OF gen
tleman. Meantime, it will be only just to