HABIT.
My dear Friends:
If you wish to have power to say, in the words of the imperial slave of the beautiful Egyptian,
"Let me, . . . . . . .
With those hands that grasp'd the heaviest club,
Subdue my worthiest self,"
you must not wholly overlook the importance of Habit, while establishing your system of life.
Always indicative of character, habit may yet, to a certain extent, do us the greatest injustice, through mere inadvertency. Indeed, few young persons attach much importance to such matters, until compelled by necessity to unlearn, with a painful effort, what has been insensibly acquired.
Permit me, then, a few random suggestions, intended rather to awaken your attention to this branch of a polite education, than to furnish elaborate directions in relation to it.
Judging from the prevalent tone of social intercourse among our countrymen, both at home and abroad, one might naturally make the inference, that most of them regard Rudeness and Republicanism as synonymous terms. Depend upon it, that as a people, we are retrograding on this point. Our upper class—or what would fain be deemed such—in society, may more successfully imitate the fashionable follies and conventional peculiarities of the Old World, than their predecessors upon the stage of action did; but fashion is not good breeding, any more than arrogant assumption, or a defiant independence of the amenities of life, is true manliness. Breaking away from the ceremonious old school of habit and manner, we are rapidly running into the opposite extreme, and the masses who, with little time or inclination for personal reflection, on such subjects, naturally take their clue, to some extent, from the assumed exponents of the laws of the fickle goddess, exaggerating the value of the defective models they seek to imitate, into the grossest caricature of the whole, and, mistaking rudeness for ease, and impudence for independence, so defy all abstract propriety, as, if not to "make the angels weep," at least to mortify and disgust all observant, thinking men, whose love and pride of country sees in trifles even, indications more or less auspicious to national advancement.
All this defiance of social restraint, this professed contempt for the suavities and graces that should redeem existence from the complete engrossment of actualities, is bad enough at home; but its exhibition abroad is doubly humiliating to our national dignity. Every American who visits foreign countries, whether as the accredited official representative of his government, or simply in the character of a private citizen, owes a duty to his native land, as one of those by the observance of whom strangers are forming an estimate of the social and political advancement of the people who are making the great experiment of the world, and upon whom the eyes of all are fixed with a peculiar and scrutinizing interest.
It has been well said of us, in this regard, that "our worst slavery is the slavery to ourselves." Trammelled by the narrowest social prejudices at home, Americans, breaking loose from these restraints abroad, run riot, like ill-mannered school-boys, suddenly released from the discipline which, from its very severity, prompts them to indulge in the extreme of license. Thus, we lately had accounts of the humiliating conduct of some Americans, who, being guests one night at the Tuileries, actually so far forgot all decency as to intrude their drunken impertinence upon the personal observation of the Emperor! And, when informed, the next morning, that, at the instance of their insulted host, the police had followed them, when they left the palace, to ascertain whether they were not suspicious characters who had surreptitiously obtained admittance to the imperial fête, they are reported to have pronounced the intelligence "rich!" Shame on such exhibitions!—they disgrace us nationally.