Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 20.djvu/122

112 to the passion of an English crowd. A throng pressing to get at the doors of a public hall are violent and dangerous to a degree unknown in America. But it is the native barbarism, not the climate. In figure, stature, and aspect, a body of men in England met for intellectual purposes will rarely suggest any contrast between England and America. At the Royal Academy Exhibition in London on my first visit, when I studied the people rather than the pictures, and at the opening of the new Town Hall in Manchester, where four thousand people in full dress were wandering through the hall, corridors, and state apartments of the vast structure, the great mass of the people were not different from American in any of the respects named by Mr. Young. There is a marked difference, which an Englishman living in America expressed by saying that English women are dowdy compared with American. I should not say this, for it is not true; but it is true that, while cultivated and attractive refinement and taste are the same with women of the superior class in both countries, there is much less diffusion of the influence of this class in England than in America; and, so far from Mr. Young's view being true, it is rather the fact that a general crowd is much less good-looking in England than in America, and in no respect will American women suffer in comparison with English.

My first year in England took me over the region from London to Oxford, and I used every opportunity to observe both men and women, with the result that I hardly at all saw Mr. Young's British type. I did see it in a few gentlemen pampered with port and in farmers rosy with beer, but commonly I saw the American type, as Mr. Young would call it. In a society of thirty gentlemen with whom I met weekly, the type was much more American than it would have been in Plymouth, Massachusetts figures slighter and temperament more nervous. The authorities quoted by Mr. Young have spoken much more from hasty theory than from any real facts. Dr. Reich has no warrant whatever for asserting a great difference between English and American physical types. The differences are not so much physical as moral, and they are not, with some exceptions, so much differences of type as differences superficially established by habits. If England had had American education and abstinence for the past fifty years, and could learn freedom, equality, and humanity as Americans do, it would be hard to see any great difference between the two peoples. What Dr. Reich says of the dryness and heat of America is said ignorantly. Is American air so dry along the Atlantic coast, and within reach of the great line of Northern lakes? The truth is, not that America is too dry, but that England is often not dry enough, and at other times is more dry than America. Dr. Reclam is out of sight of the facts completely when he compares the air of America and its effects to those of heights where lightness and dryness prevail, and thinks Americans characterized by peculiarities such as in Europe