From the Woman's Home Companion July 1903
I am so impressed with "decline of courtesy" in America that I have not words enough to express all I feel. In a recent issue of a daily paper I found the following extract and I am constantly brought into contact with young men who are types of the young man that this scrap mentions. Young women are, unfortunately, also only too often to be included in the same category:
"Sometimes I wonder," said a middle-aged woman who constantly travels up and down in the "L," "if there were ever such bad manners anywhere as in the New York elevated trains. I don't demand that a man should give up his seat to a woman. It may be that I cannot exactly understand how a man can comfortably keep his seat when a woman older than himself is standing; still, that is his privilege. But when I see a man push by a woman, and run in to get a seat ahead of her, she a middle-aged woman and he a young man; when I see a man calmly slide into a seat that is vacant before the woman in the aisle can get to it; when I see a man deliberately spitting on the floors of cars and elevated stations, I wonder if manners are going to become entirely a thing of the past. Certainly they grow worse every year, for every year more and more men seem to pride themselves not only on having no manners, but definitely bad manners. It is chiefly young men of whom I complain. It seems to be a matter of pride with them to demonstrate their complete indifference to the comfort or convenience of any one else, especially women. From present indications it would seem that the twentieth-century model gentleman is to be he who can with the most sang-froid push a woman to one side and take her place."
Smoking is another matter in which the younger generations are great offenders. Many a man forgets that the solace he derives from his cigar is not always so keenly shared by ladies in whose company the smoker chances to be. Sometimes a man asks permission to smoke. He does not, however, always consider this needful, and the result is that many a lady is discomforted, that he may not be deprived of his vice. Smoking at public dinners cannot be too strongly condemned, as there are certain to be some among those present to whom smoking is not agreeable, and true courtesy would indicate that no chances of offending be taken.
I regret to have to say that the "good old days" when deportment was the one thing that was taught most diligently in schools for girls has been very largely set aside for "fads" along intellectual lines.
I have been surprised and shocked on more than one occasion by the total lack of courtesy on the part of many women. In one instance this was disagreeably manifested, when a woman who was an utter stranger to me intruded herself into my private box at an assembly where I was a guest, and which was being reserved by me for some friends. This woman entered without invitation, and took the very best seat, which she retained throughout the evening. It is quite impossible for me to understand this kind of procedure.
One cause for the too-prevalent lack of courtesy arises from the rapid growth of population in America, which emigration has brought to our shores, often from the fields and bogs of their native land, frequently without education and certainly without culture. Another cause for the lack of courtesy may be found in defective home-training by American-born fathers and mothers, who delegate to hired people the conscientious development that once was the delightful privilege of the old-fashioned American home. Into this training the gentle influences of the Sabbath in the old days added a large part, while today the rollicking lad and his more pronouncedly rollicking sister lay aside all restraints, and hide themselves away on automobiles, bicycles and trolleycars for fun, not improvement, forgetting to "remember the Sabbath day" even by cultivating decent manners.
The present day generation takes too much for granted. They have been taught that the door leading forward toward success is marked "push," and they forget that a little consideration for others is only courteous.
Even in department stores is it true that there is only too frequently scant courtesy on the part of those from whom it surely ought to be expected. Many of the savings-banks might well send some of their attendants to a school where courtesy could be taught, with excellent results. The haste and hurry of the period also assist in creating a lack of courtesy. There is not time, it would seem, to cultivate good manners, or to act upon them even if cultivated.
It is to be hoped that America will not suffer the present decline of courtesy to prevail in the future. Good manners make life pleasanter and more agreeable both to those who have them and to those who come in contact with them.
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