ii4 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



and ridiculous in any just view of the real facts. It does not follow 

 that gestures and movements, due to, we will say, acute tactical sensi- 

 tiveness, indicate community of race. Some which I have had myself, I 

 remark in my English housekeeper, and no doubt I might see them in 

 an Indian or a negro. But one decisive fact disposes of Dr. Biichner's 

 inference. The English much oftener suggest the Indian type than 

 the Americans do, and there is much less extravagance in imagining, 

 baseless as the notion would be, that England is turning Indian than 

 in supposing that America shows such a tendency. In America I never 

 saw a markedly Indian type without Indian blood, but I have seen it 

 in England again and again ; in one case a lady with the dirty-black 

 skin, straight, intensely black hair, high, fierce temper, indifference to 

 grime and smut on her hands, and habitually very bad breath of a 

 savage, and yet purely English, and as much a lady and a Christian as 

 her peculiarities permitted. America is much further than England 

 from the Indian type, and is not tending toward it, but the contrary. 

 In the earliest American days the opinion was at one time general in 

 England that the climate of Virginia turned the colonists into blacks, 

 and that, besides going black, a man was there harnessed into the plow 

 and the cart and made to do the work of a beast. The like notions, 

 only not quite so outrageous, form now a large part of English and 

 foreign supposed knowledge of America, and Dr. Biichner's notion 

 that Americans tend toward the Indian type is about the worst item 

 of this pseudo-knowledge. English ignorance about America seems 

 to me the worst ignorance anywhere existing. It is largely due to the 

 greed of the general English mind for mean ideas of America. Un- 

 fortunately, many Americans unwittingly feed this greed, either from 

 lacking correct comparative knowledge of England and America, or 

 from making assertions or admissions which will be entirely misunder- 

 stood by the English mind. It requires a good deal of varied resi- 

 dence and reading for an American to know accurately and adequately 

 his own country, and to know it in comparison with England requires 

 residence in England, and that among the people. The most rural 

 parts of England are best for knowledge calculated to throw light on 

 America. The peculiar Yankee characteristics, as of guessing and 

 questioning and cute getting to know all about a person or matter, I 

 have actually seen in England, in their native seats. They are all old 

 rural English, and have nothing to do with either climate or character 

 in America. In America they have dwindled and been effaced more 

 than they have in England. 



But what I would particularly emphasize is the twofold fact that 

 the character and the climate which are said to be American are both 

 English a good deal more than they are American. The nervous tem- 

 perament ; the excess of energy ; the exaggerations and intensities of 

 character ; the vulgarities and madness of selfish getting ; the fierce 

 resort to sham and shoddy as a short cut to profit ; and all the forms 



