AMERICAN CLIMATE AND CHARACTER. m 



quent in England than in America. It is common to find gentlemen, 

 who are such in character and position, delightfully genial at one time 

 and violently passionate at another. I met in America a gentleman of 

 the hest standing in his English home, the winning charm of whose 

 manners awakened in me the desire to study character in the old coun- 

 try. One of my friends was dining with this gentleman after his 

 return, and was asked, as an American, to state what the case was 

 between the North and the South in the civil war. My friend made a 

 moderate statement of his view as a Northern man, and, when he had 

 concluded, his host, his face white and his lips trembling with passion, 

 replied, " I have been several weeks in your country, in the North and 

 in the South, and there isn't a word of truth in what you have said ! " 

 There was a second English gentleman present, who insisted that Mr. 

 Garrison and other American friends had given the same account, and 

 that it must be true. This second gentleman is physically what Mr. 

 Young would call an American, and he has no more reserve of temper 

 than the typical Boston gentleman. 



Extreme passion is very much more common in England than in 

 America, and especially in the north of England. But I doubt 

 whether the very strong air and the intense vital vigor which it 

 tends to produce explain it. It seems to me rather a moral sur- 

 vival, one of the signs of barbarism holding on which one so often 

 encounters in England. The habit which many of the working-class 

 have of brutally kicking their wives in the abdomen, and many other 

 forms of British masculine energy, would disappear without reference 

 to climate if education and other moral influences were such as they 

 are in America. 



Mr. Young singularly errs in stating that Britons have a stout, fresh, 

 rosy habit, which they directly lose in American air. I am writing 

 where there is a country population of four thousand, and I should 

 make money by giving Mr. Young a dollar for every rosy Briton he 

 could find if he would give me a cent each for every "peculiarly 

 American" member of the population. In the towns, Mr. Young's 

 Britons can be more easily found ; but the type is more conspicuous 

 than it is numerous. Of course, the style of dress, the cut of the 

 beard, and the puff and color given to the face by drink, are not due 

 to climate and are not race-characteristics ; yet many not sufficiently 

 instructed observers fail to see that, if they were to deduct these char- 

 acteristics in the case of many who seem strikingly English, the type 

 would look quite American. The last large company of Englishmen 

 whom I have seen shoAved very many of the " nervous, energetic, large- 

 jointed skeletons " of Mr. Young's peculiarly American type, and I 

 have personal knowledge which enables me to say that nowhere in 

 America could an equal number be found of men violently excitable 

 and explosive. Temper, in fact, and nerves, are generally very much 

 worse in England than in America. There is no approach in America 



