The
explanation of them in any way that would generally be considered
satisfactory would be a difficult task. The influences which bring
about a certain state of manners at any given time or place are
always numerous and generally obscure, but we think something of
this sort may be safely offered in consideration of the late "goings
on" in Brooklyn.
In the first place, the newspapers and other cheap periodicals, and
the lyceum lectures and small colleges, have diffused through the
community a kind of smattering of all sorts of knowledge, a taste for
reading and for "art"--that is, a desire to see and own pictures--
which, taken together, pass with a large body of slenderly equipped
persons as "culture," and give them an unprecedented self-confidence
in dealing with all the problems of life, and raise them in their
own minds to a plane on which they see nothing higher, greater,
or better than themselves. Now, culture, in the only correct and
safe sense of the term, is the result of a process of discipline,
both mental and moral.
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