CHAPTER XII.

CUSTOMS, MANNERS, HABITS, ETC.

SOCIAL conditions variously influence and model customs, usages, habits, and manners. In Europe, the distinctions which have existed for centuries, the different social conditions, pursuits, and daily occupations of each social stratum, have shaped out a variety of customs peculiar to each class. At the side, therefore, of certain national habits, common to all-nobility, burghers, the lower classes, composed of operatives, laborers and peasantryeach of them has certain characteristic usages. No such social subdivisions and distinctions having existed in America at the start, nor existing now, the customs, habits, usages of the Americans are more uniform than those of European nations. Little if any difference exists therein between cities and villages, between what is customary in the dwellings of the rich in commercial cities, or plantations, and in the cottages of artisans and farmers. These habits, notwithstanding their modification by wealth or by attempted assimilation to the modes of life of the aristocratic and superior European classes, in their generality are similar to the mode of life among the small European burghers (petite bourgeoisie). They are similar in their general character and their minute shadowings, as the mode of life of the first settlers was necessarily a transmission and a continuation of the life of the small burghers

artisans, or yeomen, from whom most of the settlers draw their honorable origin. Domestic, family, household virtues were once in Europe called specially the burgher's virtues; they consisted in quietness, sobriety, order, laboriousness, morality. Such was and must have been preëminently the American domestic life and intercourse. Luxury, lavishness, expensiveness, are only comparatively recent acquirements, overhanging the traditional customs.

The ceremonies used at festivals, weddings, receptions, and various other occasions, in even those habitual social intercourses among the wealthiest who are most apt to imitate the European higher classes, differ nevertheless almost wholly from those in use among them; bear the strongest resemblance to the usages which are considered in European higher society as obsolete, but which are religiously preserved in some corners, in second and third rate cities, by their burgher inhabitants. The highest burgher classes of the Old World, composed of bankers, capitalists, money makers, or financiers, wealthy industrials, and professional men, since the great French revolution mix more or less freely, and stand almost on an equal footing with the ancient nobility. Their manners and customs are nearly the same, and small existing differences can be detected only by a well experienced eye. The customs and manners common to them are rarely transplanted into America, and are not indigenous to the country. Besides, new exigencies and modes, special and peculiar to the American conditions of society and life, have operated on the social intercourse. And thus an immense difference exists between the conventionalities by which social intercourse is regulated in Europe and in America. However complete the knowledge of the like conventionalities and habits acquired among the best and most finished society in Europe, one might still stumble often here, as many such conventionalities have

a totally opposite signification, in their bearing, as politeness and impoliteness, in America and in Europe.

Notwithstanding the already acquired and rapidly increasing wealth and prosperity of the people, there exist only a few individuals and no classes of leisure, and their influence on social life and its usages has hitherto been in general imperceptible. In Europe the aristocracy,

that is, a whole class of families living by the labor of others, have formed, for uncounted centuries-Greece and Rome included the pivot of social relations, their apex, as well as the nursery of refined customs and usages. In America individual labor and occupation have been imperative necessities of existence, as well as the means of social distinction; they have therefore influenced and shaped out to a great extent American customs and usages, stamping on them in many respects a distinct mark. This land, this society proffers no space, no inducements, no charm for an intellectual and still less for a social leisure. Production, activity are enjoyments, and existence becomes a burden, and deteriorates morally and materially without a serious pursuit, without daily work and occupation. In European societies persons of leisure or of idleness plunge into various excitements; many of them refined, but often mischievous to themselves and others. America proffers only somewhat gross or coarse pastimes for such a class; most men retiring from active or business life, after a short time return to it indirectly, and continue to dabble in money-making. Thus generally when Europeans chatter, the Americans sign bills, stocks, or—as it is said in common parlance-shave.

The active, busy, industrious, and in all conditions of life, hard-working Americans do not surpass, however, in endurance of toil that immense portion of European societv, which in all social gradations is likewise obliged to

earn a livelihood, either in an elevated or in the lowest social condition. That the European men of business, of every profession, the officials, artisans, operatives, laborers -when not utterly poor and destitute-find almost daily a few hours to devote to leisure, to sociability, and even to amusement, results from a certain superior method in the distribution of their hours and occupations, and from the habits thus acquired.

The myriads of various officials, high and low, are at work more hours daily than are the men in corresponding stations in America. The wheelworks of the governmental machineries are more complicated; on account of centralization they embrace far more objects, and cover far more extensive space. The countless threads of the government and of all the branches of administration, penetrate in most minute ramifications the whole social structure, cross and combine with each other, and depend wholly upon precision in their working and rotations for preventing accumulation, interruption, stagnation. The various official correspondences, even of the inferior officials, are very complicated and extensive, and the superior, therefore, as the inferior, spends more time at his desk than his American colleague. The responsibility, the discipline, the absolute dependence on the chief or superior, the continually increasing competition, by far surpassing the demand, the almost insurmountable difficulty in finding a new occupation, position, nay the means of sustaining existence, when those once possessed are lost; all this summed up together, obliges the European officials to be to the utmost precise, diligent, and assiduous in fulfilling their daily tasks and duties.

The man of studious pursuits, the savans, the professors at universities and gymnasia, above all in Germany, generally cover a more extensive as well as a deeper ground

with their labors and investigations. They are surrounded by numerous competitors and critics; and either if dependent on government, or on the public favor or assent, they must maintain by the utmost efforts and diligence, their scholarship and their scientific name, on both which depend their mostly scanty means of daily existence. The hours devoted daily by a professor in Europe to teaching and lecturing, generally equal and often outnumber what in similar conditions are devoted here. The principal income of a professor depends upon the fees received from the students. Often several professors lecture on the same subject in the university; or a professor who has acquired fame in a speciality, attracts pupils in hundreds from all Germany. The students have mostly the free choice of university and of professor, and thus is created and maintained an uninterrupted rivalry and competition, by which science and her worshippers are equally benefited. All this taxes to the utmost the time and the mental capacities of the professors and savants, whose productivity, as is evidenced by their various publications and contributions, on the average surpass those of American scholars and men devoted to the various scientific professions. In spite of all this accumulation of labor, the European savants in general, and in particular the far-famed German professors, those mines of learning and productivity, spend almost daily a couple of hours in sociable relaxation, conviviality, or genial conversation. All such pastimes are nearly unwonted, or rarely enjoyed by the American learned brotherhood.

Artisans, shopkeepers, tradesmen, merchants, bankers, in general all business men, in Europe as in America, must rely alike upon skill, shrewdness, acuteness, and aptitude for their pursuits. But as Europe is the centre of commercial, banking and industrial activity, production, and