Etiquette, if I understand rightly the term, which in any extent is
of modern usage, had its original application to those ceremonial and
formal observances practised at courts, which had been established
by long usage, in order to preserve the sovereign power from the rude
intrusion of licentious familiarity, as well as to preserve majesty
itself from a disposition to consult its ease at the expense of its
dignity. The term came afterwards to have a greater latitude, and to
be employed to signify certain formal methods used in the transactions
between sovereign states.
In the more limited, as well as in the larger sense of the term, without
knowing what the etiquette is, it is impossible to determine whether
it is a vain and captious punctilio, or a form necessary to preserve
decorum in character and order in business. I readily admit, that
nothing tends to facilitate the issue of all public transactions more
than a mutual disposition in the parties treating to waive all ceremony.
But the use of this temporary suspension of the recognised modes of
respect consists in its being mutual, and in the spirit of conciliation,
in which all ceremony is laid aside. On the contrary, when one of
the parties to a treaty intrenches himself up to the chin in these
ceremonies, and will not on his side abate a single punctilio, and that
all the concessions are upon one side only, the party so conceding does
by this act place himself in a relation of inferiority, and thereby
fundamentally subverts that equality which is of the very essence of all
treaty.