Many a gentleman of the old school has been provoked to remark regretfully upon the under-bred manners and bearing of even the better classes in the modern industrial communities; and the decay of the ceremonial code--or as it is otherwise called, the vulgarisation of life--among the industrial classes proper has become one of the chief enormities of latter-day civilisation in the eyes of all persons of delicate sensibilities.

The decay which the code has suffered at the hands of a busy people testifies--all depreciation apart--to the fact that decorum is a product and an exponent of leisure class life and thrives in full measure only under a regime of status.
The origin, or better the derivation, of manners is no doubt, to be sought elsewhere than in a conscious effort on the part of the well-mannered to show that much time has been spent in acquiring them.
The proximate end of innovation and elaboration has been the higher effectiveness of the new departure in point of beauty or of expressiveness.

In great part the ceremonial code of decorous usages owes its beginning and its growth to the desire to conciliate or to show good-will, as anthropologists and sociologists are in the habit of assuming, and this initial motive is rarely if ever absent from the conduct of well-mannered persons at any stage of the later development.
Manners, we are told, are in part an elaboration of gesture, and in part they are symbolical and conventionalised survivals representing former acts of dominance or of personal service or of personal contact.

In large part they are an expression of the relation of status,--a symbolic pantomime of mastery on the one hand and of subservience on the other.
Wherever at the present time the predatory habit of mind, and the consequent attitude of mastery and of subservience, gives its character to the accredited scheme of life, there the importance of all punctilios of conduct is extreme, and the assiduity with which the ceremonial observance of rank and titles is attended to approaches closely to the ideal set by the barbarian of the quasi-peaceable nomadic culture.

Some of the Continental countries afford good illustrations of this spiritual survival.