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To: sea_urchin who wrote (2241)	11/21/1998 7:02:00 PM
From: Tom Byron	Respond to of 81023

oh why not. it's saturday afternoon. and it's rainning. i'd might has well thrown in albert jay nock's commentary on the the beecher-tilton schandal of the early part of this century in the good old us of a...(setting of the scene: Brooklyn, ny. main participants - a bishop and a least one of his femal parishioners.) ...from mr nock's: the memoirs of a superfluous man....here we go....As a rule our district kept little track of the high-life's affairs down on the Heights, and such news as occasionally seeped through to us came as from another world. I did not come along in time to be caught in the backwash of the great Beecher-Tilton scandal, but I heard casual mention of it in the family circle years afterward. This cataclysm razed the Heights from end to end, and rocked the whole country; there had never been such a devastating social upheaval. It is forgotten now, as it should not be by students of society at least, for its history is a compendious index to the character and quality of American social life in Mrs. Wharton's "days of innocence." No critic can hope to know precisely what representative American society was like in that period unless he makes himself letter-perfect in a study of this affair. (con't)

To: sea_urchin who wrote (2241)	11/21/1998 7:11:00 PM
From: Tom Byron	Respond to of 81023

(con't)...My family's attitude towards all this commotion could hardly have made a distinct impression on me, for I knew nothing about Beecher or his alleged misdoings, and cared as little. Yet when I read Paxton Hibben's excellent study of Beecher a few years ago, it instantly interpreted that attitude for as one of calm and humorous detachment. Everyone in those days subscribed tacitly to a pretty fairly uniform code of morals, but there was a snuffiness about the ostentatioous pieties and moralities of those concerned in the Beecher-Tilton imbroglio which made it impossible to take their contentions or representations seriously. What people! one said at once. What a life! What a society! In its dulness, its fatuity, its simian inablity to see when its was making itself ridiculous, was there ever anything on earth like it? My family clearly had little double, on the evidence offered, that the scandal rested on a sound basis of fact; that Beecher had been entertaining himself in dalliance (con't)

To: sea_urchin who wrote (2241)	11/21/1998 7:20:00 PM
From: Tom Byron	Respond to of 81023

(con't) with one at least, and perhaps more, of his female parishioners. But to arraign him for that, and then to get up a great pother about it, all on the sheer score of religion and morality (and afterward, yes, actually, on the score of legality, when Tilton haled Beecher in to the civil courts on a charge of alienation) --this procedure would seem the acme of a stilted burlesque....Yet to regard a matter with humour and detachement is by no means the same as regarding it lightly. My parents would have been the last to regard any matter of adultery lightly, the last to dismiss it with Lincoln's droll saying that for those whoe like that sort of thing it sis probably about the sort of thing they like. On the contrary, their view would naturally be, and I am sure was, much more serious than any which the affair brought to light. The eye of common sense would see simple that the COURTS OF LAW, RELIGION AND MORALS WERE NOT COURTS OF COMPETENT JURISDICTION. (my emphasis).. (con't)

To: sea_urchin who wrote (2241)	11/21/1998 7:30:00 PM
From: Tom Byron	Respond to of 81023

(con't)..Their sanctions were of debatable validity in the premises, and when as egregiously overpressed as they were in the case of Beecher, the effort to apply them became ridiculous.. The court of undebatably competent jurisdiction would be the court of TASTE and MANNERS. Whatever law, religion and morals may say or not say,the best reason and spirit of man resents adultery as in execrably bad taste, and from this decision there is no appeal. Moreover, the three imcompetent courts could not take proper cognisance of the fact that Beecher and Tilton were intimate friends. The court of taste and manners could and would; and a properly enlightened social resentment would be according enhanced, for all but the very lowest of bad manners exempts the wives of one's friends. On the other hand, the three courts can and do take into account the principle of raw expediency, which in the affair of Beecher was made almost paramount, to the intense disgust of all who had any sense of what was (con't)

To: sea_urchin who wrote (2241)	11/21/1998 7:34:00 PM
From: Tom Byron	Respond to of 81023

(con't)... due to common propriety and decency. The court of tast and manner takes no account of it....I grew up in the conviction that in a truly civilised society the sanctions of taste and manners would have a compelling force at least equal to those of law, religion and morals. By way of corollary I became convinced that expediency is the worst possible guild of life.....(i'll stop here)...hope this sheds some light....seems that everything eventually repeats itself...:)