And then note, lastly, that in this case, as in others, an organization inoperative for its proper purpose, it is employed for quite other purposes. What is the usual plea put in for giving and attending these tedious assemblies? “I admit that they are dull and frivolous enough,” replies every man to your criticisms; “but then, you know, one must keep up one’s connexions.” And could you get from his wife a sincere answer, it would be—“Like you, I am sick of these formal parties; but then, we must get our daughters married.” The one knows that there is a profession to push, 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 occasional 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 {46} with the refined are driven away by it, and led into bad 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 in the faces of its devotees at the close of the London season, the mortality of milliners and the like, which its sudden exigencies yearly involve;—and when to all these we add its fatal sin, that it withers up and kills that high enjoyment it professedly ministers to—shall we not conclude that to rationalize etiquette and fashion, is an aim yielding to few in urgency? * * * * * There needs, then, a protestantism in social usages. Forms which have ceased to facilitate and have become obstructive—have to be swept away. Signs are not wanting that some change is at hand. A host of satirists, led on by Thackeray, have long been engaged in bringing our sham-festivities, and our fashionable follies, into contempt; and in their candid moods, most men laugh at the frivolities with which they and the world in general are deluded. Ridicule has always been a revolutionary agent. Institutions that have lost their roots in men’s respect and faith are doomed; and the day of their dissolution is not far off. The time is approaching, then, when our system of social observances must pass through some crisis, out of which it will come purified and comparatively simple.