can body politic has worked these changes. Character, commerce, politics have been influenced by the negro. Later and more in detail we shall study the effect of the negro on American psychology. CHAPTER XVI MANNERS AND THE IMMIGRANT In the study of the immigrant and the effect of immigration on the American people much has been written of the apprehended danger of the inclusion of a great mass of foreign blood in the American body politic. The danger feared has been twofold; first, that the immigrant will "devitalize" the American; second, that he will corrupt the American and reduce him to his own lower moral standard. We have already dealt with those two phases of immigration, but the effect of the immigrant on the manners of a people, curiously enough, appears to have been ignored by the American commentator. It is solely as a psychological influence that we consider the manners of the American people. 戛 It may not appear at first glance that the social intercourse of a people can have any relation to character. We are apt to regard behavior, politeness, conventions, and the forms of society as the pleasant things of life, the oil to make the wheels turn smoothly and eliminate friction, but seldom as part of life itself; although we learned in our youth that “manners maketh man," and in our adolescence imbibed the pleasing philosophy that rank was but the guinea's stamp and did not really count, as "a man's a man for a' that." Seemingly, then, manners are good things to have but not essential; yet a more minute examination will show that manners are an index to character,1 and that the character of a people is influenced by their manners; that is, the method of their social intercourse. "Many causes go to the making of manners, says that profound observer of America, Mr. Bryce, as one may see by noting how much better they are in some parts of Europe than in other parts, where, nevertheless, the structure of society is equally aristocratic or democratic, as the case may be;" 2 and he cites Roscher: "It was a reproach in Europe against republics that their citizens were rude: witness the phrases, manières d'un Suisse,' 'civilisé en Hollande.'” Mr. Bryce thinks that this reproach will not lie against the Americans. "On the whole," he says, "bearing in mind that the English race has less than some other races of that quickness of perception and sympathy which goes far to make manners good, the Americans have gained more than they have lost by equality. I do not think that the upper class loses in grace, I am sure that the humbler class gains in independence." He makes this fur 1 “Manners are, generally, the product of the very basis of the character of a people, but they are also sometimes the result of an arbitrary convention between certain men; thus they are at once natural and acquired.” — De Tocqueville: Democracy in America, vol. II, p. 230. 2 Bryce: The American Commonwealth, vol. 11, p. 755. 'Bryce: Op. cit. p. 755. ther observation: "Equality improves manners, for it strengthens the basis of all good manners, respect for other men and women simply as men and women, irrespective of their station in life."1 Anticipating Mr. Bryce by half a century, De Tocqueville ascribed to equality the same influence of manners. "Several causes," he says, "may concur to render the manners of a people less rude; but of all these causes, the most powerful appears to me to be the equality of conditions. Equality of conditions and growing civility in manners, are, then, in my eyes, not only contemporaneous occurrences, but correlative facts."2 Yet this acute critic and philosopher contradicts himself later, when he says: "In democracies all stations appear doubtful; hence it is that the manners of democracies, though often full of arrogance, are commonly wanting in dignity, and, moreover, they are never either well disciplined or accomplished." After a democracy rises on the ruins of an aristocracy, he observes, men have lost "the common law of manners," and they have not yet made up their minds to do without it. "Thus it may be said, in one sense, that the effect of democracy is not exactly to give men any particular manners, but to prevent them from having manners at all." The most evanescent thing, he adds, is manners. "The feelings, the passions, the 1 Bryce: Op. cit., p. 810. 2 De Tocqueville: Democracy in Amercia, vol. 11, p. 173. virtues, and the vices of an aristocracy may sometimes reappear in a democracy, but not its manners; they are lost and vanish forever, as soon as the democratic revolution is completed."1 The light and exquisite touches of manners are effaced from men's memories almost immediately after the fall of an aristocracy. "Men can no longer conceive what those manners were when they have ceased to witness them; they are gone, and their departure was unseen, unfelt; for in order to feel that refined enjoyment which is derived from choice and distinguished manners, habit and education must have prepared the heart, and the taste for them is almost as easily lost as the practice of them. Thus not only a democratic people cannot have aristocratic manners, but they neither comprehend nor desire them; and as they never have thought of them, it is to their minds as if such things had never been."2 What the manners of the Americans are may be learned from the Americans themselves. It is the fashion to sneer at the inexactness of the press and its carelessness of statement, which is not entirely unwarranted, and future historians who shall attempt to reconstruct history through the medium of the daily newspapers will find themselves involved in endless confusion, but the newspaper and the magazine with approximate accuracy reflect the state of society, the vices, the faults and the foibles of a people; and where writers, widely Op. cit., p. 233. 1 Op. cit., p. 232. 2 |