of one or other—necessarily distract all minds from the thoughts and feelings which should occupy them—necessarily, therefore, subvert those conditions under which only any sterling intercourse is to be had. And this, indeed, is the fatal mischief which these {43} conventions entail—a mischief to which every other is secondary. They destroy those pleasures which they profess to subserve. All institutions are alike in this, that however useful, and needful even, they originally were, they in the end cease to be so, but often become detrimental. While humanity is growing, they continue fixed; daily get more mechanical and unvital; and by and by tend to strangle what they before preserved. Old forms of government finally grow so oppressive, that they must be thrown off even at the risk of reigns of terror. Old creeds end in being dead formulas, which no longer aid but distort and arrest the general mind; while the State-churches administering them, come to be instruments for subsidizing conservatism and repressing progress. Old schemes of education, incarnated in public schools and colleges, continue filling the heads of new generations with what has become relatively useless knowledge, and, by consequence, excluding knowledge which is useful. Not an organization of any kind—political, religious, literary, philanthropic—but what, by its ever-multiplying regulations, its accumulating wealth, its yearly addition of officers, and the creeping into it of patronage and party feeling, eventually loses its original spirit, and sinks into a lifeless mechanism, worked with a view to private ends—a mechanism which not merely fails of its first purpose, but is a positive hindrance to it. Thus is it, too, with social usages. We read of the Chinese that they have “ponderous ceremonies transmitted from time immemorial,” which make social intercourse a burden. The court forms prescribed by monarchs for their own exaltation, have, in all times and places, ended in consuming the comfort of their lives. And so the artificial observances of the dining-room and saloon, in proportion as they are many and strict, extinguish that agreeable communion which they were intended to secure. The dislike with which people commonly speak of society that is “formal,” and “stiff,” and “ceremonious,” {44} implies a general recognition of this fact; and this recognition involves the inference that all usages of behaviour which are not based on natural requirements, are injurious. That these conventions defeat their own ends is no new assertion. Swift, criticising the manners of his day, says—“Wise men are often more uneasy at the over-civility of these refiners than they could possibly be in the conversation of peasants and mechanics.”