The forms assumed by the Proper Thing in various regions are of infinite variety, and sometimes even more startling than ludicrous. In certain of the South Sea Islands, for instance, it is the Proper Thing for children to kill their parents when verging on old age; and the parents are quite agreeable to the practice, which derives its power from religious belief, as the tyrant’s dictates often do in heathen countries. In China the Proper Thing has been a terrible autocrat. There, women’s feet have been reduced to the shape and size of a nutmeg, and mandarins’ nails lengthened to a proportionate enormity—all out of deference to the Proper Thing, which to them means being idle and known to be idle. There, awe of the imperial presence has made it indispensable to ‘nine times knock the noddle;’ and we know how a representative of our own country was justly applauded in England for refusing to perform that ceremony, or conform to the exigences of the Proper Thing as by law established in China. It stalks across the lone expanses of the North American prairies, inspiring men to let their hair grow to the ground and make pompous speeches; while it lays heavy weights on women’s shoulders and crops their locks, and in some places flattens children’s heads in their cradles. East and west, in the past and in the present, its legislation is always seen taking the most contradictory forms, but almost equally inconvenient in all. Thus in ancient Mexico it decreed that the nobility should go to court in their shabbiest dresses, because no one might dare to be smart in the presence of the Emperor; and in modern Europe it decrees that ladies shall impoverish themselves rather than not go to court in a blaze of splendour. In this instance, however, there is no question as to which decree is the most convenient.
The capriciousness of this power is its most objectionable characteristic, since its rule would be highly beneficent if it only attacked bad manners and customs, which on the contrary it very often overlooks. In Germany, for example, people with the longest prefaces to their names, the addresses on whose envelopes are a perfect volume of titles, are allowed to pass their knives and forks with alarming celerity in front of their neighbours at dinner, in order to plunge them into some distant coveted dish. No doubt their appetites are more enormous than ours, for in the matter of capacity for food, beyond the widest width there always seems to be a wider still; but the exigences of the Proper Thing ought at least to make them wait until the dishes are handed to them in civilised form, or even do without the object of their desire rather than risk cutting off their neighbours’ noses. But it really seems that the more stringent the rule of the Proper Thing, the more latitude is given to disagreeable manners. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, for example, it was much more of an autocrat even than it is now; and yet with all the flattery, the bowing and scraping and long titles, no one put any constraint on his temper, and the best bred people thought nothing of throwing things at each other’s heads when they were in a passion. Occurrences of this sort are rare now, at least in high-class and diplomatic society.