Sth Dec. A very interesting debate recently took place at the Londo School Board on the subject of the manners of the juvenile Cockneys, Although the critics did not prove their point, that the amelioration in the speech and address of the young is not commensurate with the.general advance in refinement in the community at large, yet they adduced sufficient evidence to secure a special committee to enquire into the subject. We do not envy the work of this committee, Social science can tackle no more difficult subject than such an enquiry; the analysis is all qualitative; quantity and arithmetic have nothing to do with it or with the conclusions reached: the evidence too is elusive and terribly apt to be interpreted through the medium of one's own prejudices and sympathies. Very few minds are so qualified mentally as to be able to step outside of their environment, then anatomalise it and compare it with itself at different times as if they. were impartial Jovians or Houyhnbnms, Elderly men, who ought to be the best judges, are almost always laudatores tompons acti, and are down like nails: on new departures in thought and conduct, 'I'he improvement in the general conduct of a community such as is implied in the assuaging of manners is a slow process, and, like glacier motion, is only to be observed at all by comparisons at long intervals, We think there is clear evidence the Derby crowd is not as it was thirty years ago, blackguardism is less in evidence, and good hnimour, even if accompanied by a more staid decorum is more widely spread; queues have replaced selfish brutality at most of the theatre doors; hacking and ferocity have vanished from football, a fetid coster or sweep will no longer intrude" into a tram-car in his professional rig; wives, children, horses, and dogs are less kicked and beaten than formerly, and when a man goes to pot or the*Potteries, the natives no longer bedye hat' bricks at him by way of friendly welcome to a stranger. These points if established are evidence, but in the case of juveniles it will be more difficult to get at such data.
a curios reflection on human nature that we are far more restive under a breach of manners than under moral obliquity. Let a man or woman violate the cavons of good form' which obtain in his or her stratum of society, we think worse of it than if he or she had demolished half the decay logue, Ifa well dressed woman says "was you, a friend drops an 'h,' a guest at our table invades his mouth with a knife or ta mustard with lamb, or if he even utters his vowels in a flat Cockney tave, we are instantly conscious of a' loss of sympathy and even of a feeling of annoyance if Mrs. Grundy is bard by. The petty offender may illustrate all the Christian' virtues yet one such solecism will outbalance the lot and we heartily wish he would not come when refined folk are present. We ought to be ashamed of ourselves, but neither reason nor Christian charity can rid us of these base feelings. Great offences against good manners and good taste are forgiven and even forgotten, minor ones seldom are.
'The great American thinker tells us that of all men the Englishman stands firmest in his shoes: centuries of political freedom and the habit of taking his own line and initiative have fixed self-dependence in him' as a national characteristic: it is in the blood, and comes out as bluster and as assort of downright unabashed self-assertion which is sometimes whimsical and sometimes offensive in its manifesta~ tions. 'I'he Abbé Liszt saw it in the first two bars of the music' of Rule Britannia which say in unmistakable tones: " Here, you fellows! make room, I'm coming!" This, in some aspects an admirable phase of character, does not conduce to those amenities which assuage prejudice and lessen national antipathies and jealousies. Brasqueness is its inevitable outcome and;+brusqueness is at sad loggerheads with matiners, The average Briton as he elbows his way through life doesn't sacrifice to the Graces; but none the legs-is it true that gentlemen and men-of-tlie"world who wish to be thought gentlemen have all through their pilgrimage to offer oblations to their Ladyships. Major Pendennis was a poor creature at heart but he kept a bold front to the last by his assiduous devotions at the shrine of the goddess of Good Form. The latter is a poor divinity to swear by, but she at least hinders many from sinking back into the beast and she effectively screens us all from the Faries.
The foundation of good manners is a spirit unwilling to offend: similarly defect in manners, which we often see in spite of gentle breeding, implies a lack of fine perceptions. Neither parents nor schoolmaster can make good this lack: boors are horn as well as made, and when born, the schoolmaster's task is as hopeless a3. the making of a silk purse out of a sow's ear. On the other hand education can work wonders in manners with good material. Most children are born neither good—as Palmerston vainly held—nor desperately wicked but with faculties which are indefinitely modifiable according to influence and environment. In this lies the educater's great chance, but after all only a chance. If a boy goes to school for five hours but lives for the remaining 9 of his wakeful time under the dominancy of coarse, besotted, foul-mouthed parents, he has but a feeble prospect of refined speech and manner as he grows up, yet he has a much better prospect than if he never went to school at all. It is on this ground we think matters must be mending in juvenile manners; we think the grumblers on the London School Board are only disappointed at the slowness of the process. Juvenile crime is decreasing, youngsters have less encouragement than formerly to go to the Devil, they are more employed, and his Satanic Majesty get less chance with them if old Dr. Watts's dictum is true.
There are counter influences acting the other way; parental discipline is relaxed; adults generally are kinder to boys and girls than they were, the latter are not beaten and docked of their food as we used to be and they have more liberty all this tends to licence and licence means rudeness. American and colonial children illustrate this in excelsis: to us it is a marvel where all good American adults originate: we are prepared to swear that in their case the boy is not father to the man; within our limited experience he is a terror to life in the United States, bumptious, obtrusive, rude, and irrepressible, We have often wondered if that poor stuff which passes as fine fiction, books like the 'Bad Boy's Diary' and ' Huckleberry Finn,' is a cause or a result of American boy life. Wise old Samuel Johnson in referring to the infliction of punishment on that part of the human frame meant for such said: "Sir, boys have lost at one end of the body" (the head) "what they have gained at the other" (immunity from flogging). We are recreant to modern altruism so fur as to wish to see the old fashioned discipline re-introduced into New York. We have little complaint of our China-bred lads and lasses; the dirt of the amah and house boy constitutes their chief danger; these can best be obviated by closer association with their parents, which we think is increasingly the rule.
We intended to deliver a homily on manners in general, but 'T'uesday is too close to Sunday to wake such such a course pleasing to the general reader. We threaten to revert to it.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.