But in general,
the average boy and girl needs a "daily exercise" which in most cases
amounts to "nagging," and in the best hands is only saved from nagging
by its absence of peevishness, and the patience with which it reminds
and urges and teases into perfect observance. The teasing thing, and yet
the most necessary one, is the constant check upon the preoccupying
interests of children, so that in presence of their elders they can
never completely let themselves go, but have to be attentive to every
service of consideration or mark of respect that occasion calls for. It
is very wearisome, but when it has been acquired through laborious
years--there it is, like a special sense superadded to the ordinary
endowments of nature, giving presence of mind and self-possession,
arming the whole being against surprise or awkwardness or indiscretion,
and controlling what has so long appeared to exercise control over
it--the conditions of social intercourse.
How shall we persuade the children of to-day that manners and
conventions have not come to an end as part of the old regime which
appears to them an elaborate unreality V It is exceedingly difficult to
do so, at school especially, as in many cases their whole family
consents to regard them as extinct, and only when startled at the
over-growth of their girls' unmannerly roughness and self-assertion they
send them to school "to have their manners attended to"; but then it is
too late.
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