The Book of Business Etiquette | Page 3

There
were upheavals, of course, and now and then a slave with a braver heart
and a stouter spirit than his companions incited them to rebellion. His
head was chopped off for his pains and he was promptly forgotten. The
majority of the people for thousands of years honestly believed that this
was the only orderly basis upon which society could be organized.
Nebulous ideas of a brotherhood, in which each man was to have an
equal chance with every other, burned brightly for a little while in
various parts of the world at different times, and flickered out. They
broke forth with the fury of an explosion in France during the
Revolution and in Russia during the Red Terror. They have smoldered
quietly in some places and had just begun to break through with a
steady, even flame. But America struck the match and gathered the
wood to start her own fire. She is the first country in the world which
was founded especially to promote individual freedom and the
brotherhood of mankind. She had, to change the figure slightly, a
blue-print to start with and she has been building ever since.
Her material came from the eastern hemisphere. The nations there at
the time when the United States was settled were at different stages of
their development. Some were vigorous with youth, some were in the
height of their glory, and some were dying because the descendants of
the men who had made them great were futile and incapable. These
nations were different in race and religion, in thought, language,
traditions, and temperament. When they were not quarreling with each
other, they were busy with domestic squabbles. They had kept this up
for centuries and were at it when the settlers landed at Jamestown and
later when the Mayflower came to Plymouth Rock. Yet, with a cheerful
disregard of the past and an almost sublime hope in the future they
expected to live happily ever after they crossed the Atlantic Ocean.

Needless to add, they did not.
Accident of place cannot change a man's color (though it may bleach it
a shade lighter or tan it a shade darker), nor his religion nor any of the
other racial and inherent qualities which are the result of slow centuries
of development. And the same elements which made men fight in the
old countries set them against each other in the new. Most of the
antagonisms were and are the result of prejudices, foolish narrow
prejudices, which, nevertheless, must be beaten down before we can
expect genuine courtesy.
Further complications arose, and are still arising, from the fact that we
did not all get here at the same time. Those who came first have
inevitably and almost unconsciously formulated their own system of
manners. Wherever there is community life and a certain amount of
leisure there is a standard of cultivated behavior. And America, young
as she is, has already accumulated traditions of her own.
It is beyond doubt that the men who came over in the early days were,
as a rule, better timber than the ones who come now. They came to live
and die, if necessary, for a religious or a political principle, for
adventure, or like the debtors in Oglethorpe's colony in Georgia, to
wipe clean the slate of the past and begin life again. To-day they come
to make money or because they think they will find life easier here than
it was where they were. And one of the chief reasons for the discontent
and unrest (and, incidentally, rudeness) which prevails among them is
that they find it hard. We are speaking in general terms. There are
glorious exceptions.
The sturdy virtues of the pioneers did not include politeness. They
never do. So long as there is an animal fear of existence man cannot
think of minor elegances. He cannot live by bread alone, but he cannot
live at all without it. Bread must come first. And the Pilgrim Father was
too busy learning how to wring a living from the forbidding rocks of
New England with one hand while he fought off the Indians with the
other to give much time to tea parties and luncheons. Nowhere in
America except in the South, where the leisurely life of the plantations
gave opportunity for it, was any great attention paid to formal courtesy.

But everywhere, as soon as the country had been tamed and prosperity
began to peep over the horizon, the pioneers began to grow polite. They
had time for it.
What we must remember--and this is a reason, not an excuse, for bad
manners--is that these new people coming into the country, the
present-day immigrants, are pioneers, and that the life is not an easy
one whether it is lived among a wilderness of