with the regulation of extermal conduct and manners. When this type of morality predominates, if the actions of a man are right and his manners correct, no one worries much about the condition of his feelings. Act right and right feelings will follow; or if they don't, it doesn't much matter. The watch words are: "Do as the rest do. Conform to established ways. Follow the rules and regulations."
The high tendency of a purely social morality is to cultivate the graces and amenities, and so to produce an urbane and highly polished gentleman like Lord Chesterfield. Its low tendency is to finish the surfaces of character without touching the inward parts, so that the effect upon a sensitive observer, in the case of Talleyrand, was like that of "a silk stocking filled with mud." And an unfriendly critic remarked even of Chesterfield that he taught the "morals of a courtesan and the manners of a dancing master."
Yet let us not forget that this social morality has its merits. It has, above all, a definite method, a perfected technique, for laying hold of the raw uncultivated man and smoothing his surfaces and adjusting his external conduct to an external standard. Everyone has perhaps heard of that lady who always walked into
