The Book of Business Etiquette | Page 4

trees and beasts in a
forest or a wilderness of men and buildings in a city. The average
American brings a good many charges against the foreigner--some of
them justified, for much of the "back-wash" of Europe and Asia has
drifted into our harbor--but he must remember this: Whatever his
opinion of the immigrant may be the fault is ours--he came into this
country under the sanction of our laws. And he is entitled to fair and
courteous treatment from every citizen who lives under the folds of the
American flag.
The heterogeneous mixture which makes up our population is a serious
obstacle (but not an insuperable one) in the way of courtesy, but there
is another even greater. The first is America's problem. The second
belongs to the world.
Material progress has raced so far ahead of mental and spiritual
progress that the world itself is a good many years in advance of the
people who are living in it. Our statesmen ride to Washington in
automobiles and sleeping cars, but they are not vastly preferable to
those who went there in stagecoaches and on horseback. In other words,
there has been considerably more improvement in the vehicles which
fill our highways than there has been in the people who ride in them.
The average man--who is, when all is said and done, the most
important person in the state--has stood still while the currents of
science and invention have swept past him. He has watched the work of
the world pass into the keeping of machines, shining miracles of steel
and electricity, and has forgot himself in worshipping them. Now he is
beginning to realize that it is much easier to make a perfect machine
than it is to find a perfect man to put behind it, and that man himself,
even at his worst (and that is pretty bad) is worth more than anything

else in the scheme of created things.
This tremendous change in environment resulting from the
overwhelming domination of machinery has brought about a
corresponding change in manners. For manners consist, in the main, of
adapting oneself to one's surroundings. And the story of courtesy is the
story of evolution.
It is interesting to run some of our conventions back to their origin.
Nearly every one of them grew out of a practical desire for lessening
friction or making life pleasanter. The first gesture of courtesy was, no
doubt, some form of greeting by which one man could know another as
a friend and not an enemy. They carried weapons then as habitually as
they carry watches to-day and used them as frequently, so that when a
man approached his neighbor to talk about the prospects of the sugar or
berry crop he held out his right hand, which was the weapon hand, as a
sign of peace. This eventually became the handshake. Raising one's hat
is a relic of the days of chivalry when knights wore helmets which they
removed when they came into the house, both because they were more
comfortable without them and because it showed their respect for the
ladies, whom it was their duty to serve. And nearly every other
ceremony which has lasted was based on common sense. "Etiquette,"
as Dr. Brown has said, "with all its littlenesses and niceties, is founded
upon a central idea of right and wrong."
The word "courtesy" itself did not come into the language until late
(etiquette came even later) and then it was used to describe the polite
practices at court. It was wholly divorced from any idea of character,
and the most fastidious gentlemen were sometimes the most complete
scoundrels. Even the authors of books of etiquette were men of great
superficial elegance whose moral standards were scandalously low.
One of them, an Italian, was banished from court for having published
an indecent poem and wrote his treatise on polite behavior while he
was living in enforced retirement in his villa outside the city. It was
translated for the edification of the young men of England and France
and served as a standard for several generations. Another, an
Englishman, spent the later years of his life writing letters to his

illegitimate son, telling him exactly how to conduct himself in the
courtly (and more or less corrupt) circles to which his noble rank
entitled him. The letters were bound into a fat, dreary volume which
still sits on the dust-covered shelves of many a library, and the name of
the author has become a synonym for exquisite manners. Influential as
he was in his own time, however, neither he nor any of the others of the
early arbiters of elegance could set himself up as a dictator of what is
polite to American men, of no matter what class, and get by