Great Britain -- Social conditions -- 19th century
There would be no end of going over all the eccentricities of Fashionable
morality. To those who exact that truth which allows of no duplicity,
that honour which scorns all baseness, and that virtue which wars with
every vice, I question but every thing in the morals of this people would
appear anomalous and extraordinary: but to those who consider, how
necessary a certain portion of wickedness is to such a life of sense as
these people must necessarily lead, it will not be matter of surprise
that there should be so little genuine morality among them; the wonder
will rather be—that there should be any at all.
CHAP. IV
EDUCATION.
NO people in the universe expend larger sums upon the education of their
children than people of Fashion. It is a maxim with them to commence the
great business of instruction in the very earliest period of life; and if
the system of education corresponded with the pains bestowed upon it, and
the price at which it is purchased, no persons would do more honour to
society than the subjects of the Fashionable World. As it is, they are
not a little ornamental to a nation. They are not, it is true, either
the columns or the base of the building; they neither support nor
strengthen it: but they supply the place of reliefs, and hangings, and
other superadded decorations.
Religion is allowed a respectable place among the studies of the nursery.
All those useful tables of instruction are assiduously employed, which
teach, who was the _first_, the _wisest_, the _meekest_, and the
_strongest_ man; and the nursling is carefully conducted, by a
catechetical process, into the theory and practice of a Christian. As,
however, the child advances to boyish or girlish years, this religious
discipline is pretty generally relaxed, in order to allow sufficient
scope for the cultivation of those modish pursuits, which mark the man
and the woman of Fashion.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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