The Americans having now revolutionised throughout the whole country the method of serving hotel dinners, passing at one step from what was the worst method of all to what is greatly in advance of the practice in this matter of all other nations, I would venture to suggest another change in a matter of still greater importance. It is evident that civilisation would have been quite an impossibility, if people had not met together at meals for the purpose of conversation. This alone rescues the act of taking one’s food from its animal character, and associates it with the exercise of our moral and intellectual qualities. If we do not meet together, and converse, and exchange thought, and cultivate courtesies, our meals differ in no respects from the act of a horse or of a pig taking a feed. It is a strange mistake to suppose that there is anything intellectual or _spirituel_ in hurrying through one’s meals. The truth of the matter is exactly the reverse. To tarry at the table for the purpose of conversation makes every meal a school for the intellect, and for the promotion of the domestic and social graces. The savage hurries over his meals because he is a savage, morally and intellectually near of kin to the brute. If he could tarry over his meals he would have ceased to be a savage. All ancient and modern nations that have been highly civilised have acted instinctively on this idea. The Attic _symposia_, as well as the French _petits soupers_, rested upon it. Suppose meals are to be silently hurried through, they become mere brutish acts of eating and drinking, which any animal can perform as well as ourselves, and in much less time too. It is here that the Americans have a grand opportunity, in their widely diffused and generally practised hotel life, of which, it seemed to me, they were not availing themselves. You will see people day after day sit down to the same table, take their food in silence, and leave the table without a word having been spoken. You may observe several tables occupied at the same time in your neighbourhood, and there shall be no conversation going on at any one of them. Those who sit at them appear to be entirely occupied either with their own thoughts or with attention to what they are eating. But it would make hotel life far more agreeable, and impart to it a far greater amount of civilising power, if it were the rule that people who meet at the same table might converse with one another, without any previous acquaintance, and without any necessity for subsequent acquaintance. Let it be understood that on such occasions conversation is the correct and the civilised thing.