62 tobacco: its use and abuse. 



the United States a change for the better. . . . 

 It is in startling contrast with our ordinary train o.f 

 thought about the United States, to hear it even whis- 

 pered as a possibility, that the race of men which inhabit 

 the country is undergoing a process of physical and 

 moral degeneracy; that the symptoms we have been 

 accustomed to consider as evidences of growth are really 

 proofs of decay; that the people are, like medlars, rotten 

 before they are ripe ; and that a premature senility is 

 the true characteristic of the great Anglo-Celtic Republic 

 of the West. That such a theory should have been 

 started, gives one a shock, which does not pass off when 

 the facts upon which it professes to rest are calmly con- 

 sidered. It is said, for instance, that the bulk of Ameri- 

 cans live thoroughly unwholesome lives; consuming 

 inordinate quantities of spirituous liquors from youth 

 upward, and at all hours of the day smoking and chcicing 

 tobacco to excessj eating greedily, and giving themselves 

 no time to digest their food, always in a bustle and ex- 

 citement, enjoying neither quiet nor rational recreation, 

 nor domestic peace. And how few Americans has any 

 EngTishman known of whom he could say, that they 

 were genial or happy ! what an anxious, nervous, hag- 

 gard ex2'>ression of /ace, is that hy which ice, instinctively 

 recognize a Yankee everywhere! how completely the 

 manner, and countenance, and figure of the typical 

 Yankee answer to this account of the usual life of the 



people ! AVhat if the bad habits of men 



and women, acting with a climate that tends to exhaust 

 vitality, should really in a few generations have produced 

 a palpable inferiority of physique ? The positive asser- 



