GOOD MANNERS RETURN TO FAVOUR

Evening Post, Volume CXVIII, Issue 102, 27 October 1934, Page 25

GOOD MANNERS RETURN TO FAVOUR

There can be few people who do not appreciate good manners. By good niiinncrs T do not mean iinn manners. Fine manners are different. They consist of airs and graces, and at first sight appear useless fripperies of conduct. Arc they, thought asks Lord Cottenham in the "Daily Mail."'

Hundreds of people have put on their best clotlies and their best behaviour to moot a death that they knew to be inevitably at hand; the French devolution provided classic instances of this. With all the faults that had led some of them into the surroundings of grim and horrible tragedy in which they found themselves, the conduct of the French aristos on the scaffold won the admiration of Europe. All over the world at that time, and many times since, men have dressed themselves in their finest clothes to fight a duel or decide a wager in which they knew that all the chances were against them.

They have risen from the tables at Monte Carlo without a franc left to their name, but with no sign other than a hectic flush or an unnatural pallor that onlookers might remark. They have bowed, made their adieus, and walked out into oblivion, or to take the mistaken course of suicide, with their heads hold high and a courteous word on their lips for all.

We aro told that Nurse Cavell clothed herself with more than usual care before tho Gorman soldiers, obeying a wartime order with misery in their hearts, shot her in Brussels.

I know of men, highly strung, imaginative, who drive racing motor-cars or fly fast aircraft and have to hold their nerves in strictest check to do so, who will garb themselves on these occasions only in spotless overalls. Their gloves arc clean, the silk scarves round their necks arc neatly folded.

All this constitutes a gallant gesture of defiance. It helps them to live as they think men ought to live —despite

the uneasy promptings of the imagination—and perhaps to cite one day as they think men ought to die. Such arc line manners. And who shall say that worn like this :thcy are not admirable? Today there arc signs that wo are returning to' good manners again.; Doubtless this is due to a new generation's healthy revolt from the extravagant slackness of the post-war period.

Now, with our feet, treading more lightly up the incline to an ordered life once more, away from the mist-ridden vale of depression, good manners are coming into their own again even among those who are still in tho valley and can see as yet only a thinning of tho clouds above them.

Moreover, our good manners of today are of greater intrinsic worth than the good manners of twenty years ago. The precious metal of them has been through the furnace. It has been purified and emerges with a truer gleam. AVo are more tolerant, more understanding of human frailty. We think more deeply about the destiny of man, and so we are clearing slums and spreading education. Although,,death means less to us (ana many of us know that those who die are merely invisible and really quite close to us) we feel more poignantly than we did for those who have to face the pangs of separation, and so we fight disease more strenuously in all its forms and pay greatly increased attention—for example—to mortality in motherhood.

We arc more encouraging towards our young men md moro sympathetic towards our young women—and yet we are moro strict now than at any other time since the war. Wo hold our Dominions in friendship. Abovo all, tho whole Empire works unceasingly for a peace worth having. I think that, after mature reflection, it n>pst be conceded that all this constitutes good manner:; in the most splendid sense.