AMERICAN CLIMATE AND CHARACTER. u 3 



he supposes due to the dry northeast wind. This wind, from which 

 England and the Continent suffer so much, is very much worse than any 

 wind known to that chief part of America which extends from the At- 

 lantic to the far side of the Mississippi Valley ; and, so far as it pro- 

 duces results in exaggerated nervous activity and excesses of the nation- 

 al character, England and Germany are much worse off than America. 

 In England especially, exaggerated nervous activity and excesses of na- 

 tional character are very much worse than they are in America, and, if 

 northeast wind really causes such things, the atrocious blast certainly 

 rages across England as it never does in America. What Matthew 

 Arnold calls the effusion and the confusion and the vulgarity of the 

 middle-class Englishman, that is, of the average Englishman, is some- 

 thing very much worse than any American development, and, so far as 

 climate plays upon and excites this, England has ten days of irri- 

 tating rawness, dryness of cold wind, and poison of dust, to one that 

 America has. 



As for heat, the mistake is no less complete. England suffers more 

 from 78 than America from 98. There is never a chance to change 

 to summer dress with any security, and heat, when it does come, has 

 to be undergone without preparation. It commonly, moreover, comes 

 with excess of moisture, and has an effect more dangerous than twenty 

 degrees more of American heat. Dr. von Pettenkofer has not done 

 wisely in comparing the case of a person living in dry air with that of 

 one living in damp air. Americans do not live in dry air. and Eng- 

 lishmen, with excess of damp much of the time, do not develop fat, or 

 phlegmatically nervous temperament, or a sluggish want of intense 

 energy. The mad chase after the material things of the world is more 

 mad and feverish and violent in Manchester and its cotton-spinning 

 neighbors than it is in Chicago and the Northwest of America. I think 

 circumstances and not climate chiefly explain it, but for climate the 

 American is much less likely than the English to produce the effect. 

 The European hygienists, who are dealing with the subject by means 

 of speculative observations, ought to try a winter and spring in Old- 

 ham, Blackburn, Bolton, or Wigan, and see what a cold wind can do, 

 with dust and coal-smut, to create dry torment, and to sting the bony, 

 skinny, fierce operative into communistic madness. If they would 

 study a Lancashire mob and an English east wind, and would read the 

 tale of speculation, fierce competition, and fraud in manufacture, which 

 the Manchester men know so well, there would be an end of the shal- 

 low philosophy into which a totally wrong report of the facts has be- 

 trayed them. 



Dr. Biichner could not have gone more astray than in his astonish- 

 ing conclusion that Americans are tending toward the Indian type, 

 not only in the face and form, but in the gestures and movements. 

 The inference can not rest with Dr. Biichner on any adequate obser- 

 vation, either of Indians or of Americans, and its extravagance is wild 

 vol. xx. 8 



