The Sunday Eight O'Clock/Manners
IT is surprising how many men find it difficult to get their hats off their heads, or their cigars out of their mouths when they go into a public office or when they meet a lady on the street. Some men seem glued to their hats, in the house and out; possibly that is why so many Americans are bald. The fellows who sit in the house with their hats on, or smoke in your face at a ball game, or crowd you into the gutter as you walk down the street are quite as often as otherwise those from whom we have a right to expect better things,—they are the leaders, the fellows who come from the most celebrated centers of social aristocracy.
The man who sat next to me at table in the hotel at Alleghany City not long ago showed the keenest interest in the moral uplift of the community, but he excavated his baked potato with a tea spoon, and harpooned the bread with his fork. He did both expertly and well, so that it seems unreasonable for me to have been annoyed by it. He was a good citizen, no doubt, even though he had crude manners.
A friend of mine a few weeks ago invited a number of undergraduates to dinner. Half of those who were invited did not respond to the note of invitation, two who accepted the invitation did not come to dinner, and no one has since made any apology or explanation; yet most of these boys have had every chance to know what is mannerly and conventional.
Of course a State University like Illinois is to teach, as the catalog says, "such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions of life," but if a man gets through the course without knowing how to answer an invitation to dinner, when to take his hat off, and how to feed himself conventionally—if he doesn't learn good manners as well as accurate scientific principles—he'll get on in the world badly; he will have omitted a training which is quite as practical as anything in the mechanic arts.
April