The original Christian ideal of society was of course based on charity. It has been truly said that a perfect Christian is instinctively a finished gentleman. Courtesy is but an adaptation of charity; and the height of good‐breeding (recognized as being the faculty of setting every one at his ease, and of saying the right thing at the right time to the right person) must answer to the Christian principle that to wilfully wound your neighbor in the slightest degree is a sin. But all this, call it tact or charity, as you will, is not in itself inconsistent with truth. The French have a proverb that _Toute vérité n’est pas bonne à dire_—“Every untruth is not necessarily expedient to all men;” but even that is not a declaration of war against the principle of truth in the main. Yet what is the reality, the thing constantly before our eyes, the fact of which no one can doubt who has ever lived beyond the strictest limits of home—nay, beyond the limits of his own mind? One in a thousand fulfils the ideal of Christian courtesy, while the other nine hundred and ninety‐nine wear the regulation‐mask prescribed by fashion. Some wear it of iron, so that, in the intercourse of a lifetime, you would never feel that you knew them any better than on the first day of acquaintance; some only of wire, so that the natural personality behind it is but partially hidden even from perfect strangers; some of silk, so cunningly painted that it betrays you into thinking it nature, until, by repeated experience, you discover the imposture. Again, some wear it as the women of Constantinople wear the _yashmak_, so filmy as only to veil, not to conceal, the features. Lord Lytton, in his romance, _A Strange Story_, speaks of the “three women” which exist in the single personality of every woman; this applies to men almost equally. There is, he says, the woman as she really is, the woman as she thinks herself to be, and the woman as she appears to the world—the conventional woman. This is by far the most curious product of natural history, or, more appropriately, of the history of mechanics. The human being under social manipulation is a study for philosophers. Conventional standards of human beauty, such as the compressed foot of the Chinese lady, or the artificially stimulated rotundity of form among the women of some of the Central African tribes, the staining of the finger‐nails with henna among the Persians, etc., are as nothing and involve no deformation or suffering compared with that among the wholesale machine‐products of civilized society.