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Beauty is generally considered as the most seductive and irresistible of social graces. Yet even beyond the fascination of beauty may be ranked the charm of manner, and the brilliant interchange of thought between refined and cultivated intellects. Manner may indeed take the first place amongst social gifts, for it has an ethical value as a refining influence in all grades of life. It promotes harmony, softens ascerbity of temper, and diffuses a calm joy over the home circle; while in society it dominates as no other gift or grace can do. Beauty may often have fatal power to draw souls earthward, and conversation, with all its wit and brilliancy, may be used to vitiate the moral sense; but manner is ever noble and ennobling, because based on the two great moral principles, respect for oneself and respect for others. Christianity has formulated this harmonising principle in the words, ‘As ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them,’ and the positivist philosophy calls it ‘Altruism,’ as opposed to selfishness and egotism, the very qualities most atagonistic to fine and noble manners. Manner exists as an heirloom amongst some races, as the Celt, the Slav and the Arab. The courtesy of the Celt approaches reverence, and the Bedouins have the calm majesty of desert kings. All the Latin races generally have singular grace of idiom and gesture, but the Teuton is naturally uncouth and rough.
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