"Forms that have ceased to facilitate and have become obstructive - have to be swept away. Signs are not wanting that some change is at hand. A host of satirists, led on by Thackeray, have long been engaged in bringing our sham-festivities, and our fashionable follies, into contempt; and in their candid moods, most men laugh at the frivolities with which they and the world in general are deluded. Ridicule has always been a revolutionary agent. Institutions that have lost their roots in men's respect and faith are doomed; and the day of their dissolution is not far off."

~ Herbert Spencer. Manners and Fashion (1854). "Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative". Vol. III. D. Appleton & Co. New York. 1901