And then note, lastly, that in this case, as in all others, when an organization has become effete and inoperative for its legitimate purpose, it is employed for quite other ones--quite opposite ones. What is the usual plea put in for giving and attending these tedious assemblies? "I admit that they are stupid and frivolous enough," replies every man to your criticisms; "but then, you know, one must keep up one's connections." And could you get from his wife a sincere answer, it would be--"Like you, I am sick of these frivolities; but then, we must get our daughters married." The one knows that there is a profession to push, a practice to gain, 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 runs 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 entailed bankruptcy and 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 with the refined are driven away by it, and led into dangerous and often fatal 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 blights, withers up, and kills, that high enjoyment it professedly ministers to--that enjoyment which is a chief end of our hard struggling in life to obtain--shall we not conclude that to reform our system of etiquette and fashion, is an aim yielding to few in urgency? * * * * *