AMERICAN CLIMATE AND CHARACTER. 109 



AMERICAN CLIMATE AND CHARACTER. 



By EDWARD C. TOWNE. 



THE statements given under this head at pages 705 and 706 of 

 "The Popular Science Monthly" for September, 1880, are not 

 borne out by a careful study of facts on English soil, where alone 

 popular American and foreign ideas in regard to the English climate 

 and character can be duly corrected. I have given special attention to 

 the subject in the way of study for very many years, and in the way 

 of observation in England during the past four years, and my conclu- 

 sion is that the only English and Amei'ican facts which present a con- 

 trast are exceptional ones, and that for the several statements of Mr. 

 Young and the authorities quoted by him there is scarce any founda- 

 tion at all. Study led me to the conviction long since that the general 

 American or Yankee type, in all its varieties, belonged to England as 

 truly as to America, and that the John Bull type is an exceptional one 

 in England, and exclusively English, partly because it never emigrates, 

 and partly because its characteristics are due to English eating and 

 drinking habits. Observation has shown me that the facts are even 

 more in this direction than I had expected to find them, and that state- 

 ments such as those of Mr. Young and his authorities could hardly be 

 more wide of the mark. 



For more than thirty years I have had a habit of studying the 

 looks of people upon every opportunity, and was most familiar when I 

 came to England with American characteristics in Boston, New York, 

 Philadelphia, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Chicago, and the Northern States 

 generally, and to a considerable extent in the South. In England I 

 have seen the crowds of London, Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, and 

 other places, and have many times made a special study of large compa- 

 nies (one to four thousand) of people where I could walk about among 

 them by the hour together. On one occasion, for example, I made a 

 series of visits to a fair which brought together a large number of the 

 titled ladies of the north of England. I saw there one lady of the 

 type which made Hawthorne write as he did of the beef-eating big- 

 ness of English women a duchess who must have frequently crossed 

 Hawthorne's vision. The duke, her husband, reminded me of my own 

 father, spare and dark, and no way a John Bull. The other ladies 

 of quality had exactly the look in every way of the ladies one sees in 

 the best company in Boston. The company generally, apart from the 

 titled ladies, made no approach to a Boston company, but strikingly 

 lacked quality, whether beauty, refinement, or taste. But there was 

 no such contrast as Mr. Young asserts. There is no ground worth 

 speaking of for his statement as to the contrast between English and 

 American women. It is not at all true. I can compare a country vil- 



