a host of _non-essentials_ also! It is, indeed, impossible. The attempt
inevitably ends in the sacrifice of the first to the last--the
essentials to the non-essentials. What chance is there of getting any
genuine response from the lady who is thinking of your stupidity in
taking her in to dinner on the wrong arm? How are you likely to have
agreeable converse with the gentleman who is fuming internally because
he is not placed next to the hostess? Formalities, familiar as they may
become, necessarily occupy attention--necessarily multiply the occasions
for mistake, misunderstanding, and jealousy, on the part of one or
other--necessarily distract all minds from the thoughts and feelings
that should occupy them--necessarily, therefore, subvert those
conditions under which only any sterling intercourse is to be had.

And this indeed is the fatal mischief which these conventions entail--a
mischief to which every other is secondary. They destroy those highest
of our pleasures which they profess to subserve. All institutions are
alike in this, that however useful, and needful even, they originally
were, they not only in the end cease to be so, but become detrimental.
While humanity is growing, they continue fixed; daily get more
mechanical and unvital; and by and by tend to strangle what they before
preserved. It is not simply that they become corrupt and fail to act;
they become obstructions. Old forms of government finally grow so
oppressive, that they must be thrown off even at the risk of reigns of
terror. Old creeds end in being dead formulas, which no longer aid but
distort and arrest the general mind; while the State-churches
administering them, come to be instruments for subsidising conservatism
and repressing progress. Old schemes of education, incarnated in public
schools and colleges, continue filling the heads of new generations with
what has become relatively useless knowledge, and, by consequence,
excluding knowledge which is useful. Not an organisation of any