112 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



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 pur- 

 poses 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 ex- 

 pressed 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 Amer- 

 ica, 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 physi- 

 cal as moral, and they are not, with some exceptions, so much differ- 

 ences 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 Ameri- 

 cans 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 



