p. 634 | VENEERING

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Aug 13, 1894

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 20, No. 40.

VENEERING.

It was Gail Hamilton who said that civilized people were like an onion—peel them off, and, as layer after layer is removed, you find at heart the primitive savage. Some people have no more than just one thin coat of civilization. "Scratch a Russian, and you will find a Tartar," is an old saying. Crack the veneering of civilization, which constitutes society politeness, and you will find underneath the uncontrolled animal, who is looking out for himself, and letting the fiend take everybody else.

Look at a party on a pleasure tour in a railway train. They may be the cream of refinement and politeness, the quintessence of grace and courtesy in manner. They may be chatting in the sweetest, merriest way. Let the dining car steward put his head in the door and announce dinner. Instantly the layers slip off every one of the human onions. Each man makes a dive to outstrip his neighbor and get the first and best seat. If another shoots in ahead of him in this rush to the feed trough, he glares at him as at his worst enemy, though a second before you would have thought them the dearest friends. There may be, and usually is, abundance of food to go around, and at worst it is only a half hour's waiting. But the exquisite gentleman is transformed for the time into a ravening monster. The man who gets left has, for a brief flash, something very like murder in his heart.

If carriages are provided for the party, there is not even a pretense of assuming the veneering. A rush, a jostle, and a jump, without so much as, "I beg your pardon." Every gentleman and lady of them makes a scramble for the best places, for all the world—shall we say it? yes, come to think, we will—for all the world like cattle at a drinking trough on a hot day. Like cattle at a drinking trough, too, the weakest and slowest get left.

The immediate animal wants being satisfied, the stomachs being filled, or good seats in the carriage once obtained, it is truly astonishing how quick the veneering slips on again. The animal becomes once more the gentleman, with the manners of a chevalier, when good manners are no longer especially called for. The minute it is no longer of any consequence, every man becomes at once solicitous for his neighbor's welfare.—Selected.