n6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



I think the general facts in regard to the English race in England 

 and America and elsewhere should be referred to a history going back, 

 not for the seven American generations, nor even for the forty British 

 generations, but for at least a thousand generations. This great race, 

 whose tongue is now spoken by a quarter of civilized mankind, was 

 not made yesterday, and will not be unmade to-morrow. Its great 

 essential lines are precisely the same in England and in America. 

 New England in America was settled by English of picked moral and 

 intellectual quality, and with the enormous double advantage of free- 

 dom to educate everybody and give everybody a chance, and of entire 

 absence of the vile, pauper, and prostitute class which Old- World cir- 

 cumstances had created. The result has been that America, without 

 some superlative advantages possessed by England, has on the broad 

 level done more and done better than England in the direction of 

 mind and quality, character and achievement truly English in the 

 higher sense of race ; and that the British English type mainly differs 

 from the American English by backward relation to barbarism, the 

 Old- World use of war, monarchy and aristocracy, privilege oppressive 

 of the people, as of lords and landlords, priests, pensioners, and publi- 

 cans, and other forms of grievous denial of the rights and injury to 

 the welfare of man as man. It would take a volume to tell the story 

 of English barbarism. The English race has won on American soil 

 stages of advance not yet won in England ; and, when all the facts 

 are discriminated, it will appear that climate in America is anything 

 but unfavorable to this advance, although the opinion is a superficial 

 error that climate has much to do with character in an age when cir- 

 cumstances dominate in the environment of a highly civilized race. 

 As soon as English circumstances overtake American, there will cease 

 to be any marked difference between the English in England and the 

 English in America. And, when verified knowledge shall take the 

 place of speculative, there will be no more Americo-German attempts 

 to describe American climate as dry and damaging as compared with 

 English. The climate of America is as much better than that of Eng- 

 land as American civilization is more advanced on the broad level of 

 the common people. It would double the value of England in every 

 respect to have the climate of America. And certainly character 

 would gain more than it would lose by the change. 



