386 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



pression, the superior type of the race and the medium. She is 

 to-day, what the American exhibits her in Europe with a legiti- 

 mate pride, the most finished work of the country's two centuries 

 of civilization. 



It seems as if on the American soil, essentially democratic, 

 Nature showed herself, in what concerns woman, more aristocratic 

 than elsewhere, and that the genius of natural selection was work- 

 ing perpetually for the advancement of its elect. Of all these 

 gifts which it has lavished upon her, one of the most character- 

 istic is certainly adaptability. Few women in Europe possess in 

 the same degree as the American woman the faculty of identify- 

 ing themselves with their medium, of changing country, climate, 

 and surroundings with so wonderful suppleness. More perfectly 

 than others, she accommodates herself to circumstances, while she 

 preserves her individuality in a strange surrounding. 



Wherever we meet the American women — and we meet her 

 everywhere, in the ranks of the English peerage and of the 

 highest European aristocracy, as well as in more modest con- 

 ditions — we are struck with that marvelous adaptability in 

 which wise men see the sign of the superiority of a race or of a 

 species. It is revealed notably by that good humor with which 

 she accepts the numerous petty annoyances that every change 

 of medium implies and which put the best characters on trial. 

 She submits to them without effort, and criticises them without 

 bitterness ; she is, further, prepared for them by her education, 

 and does not expect to find everything easy. Then the necessity 

 of manual labor does. not seem to her like a degrading condition ; 

 at most only one or two generations separate her from the time 

 when her grandmother kneaded the family bread in the primitive 

 settlements. These stories are familiar to her, and the lessons 

 deduced from them are not discouraging or humiliating. She is 

 the daughter of a race of emigrants who have become a great 

 people through work, energy, and determination. She has in 

 this at her command a whole treasury of traditions from which 

 she draws, not without pride. We might say, in listening to 

 these stories, that we were hearing one of those grandes dames 

 of the past century, emigrants and poor, telling with pride in 

 their memoirs how, to supply their wants, they worked in Lon- 

 don or in Germany, utilizing their accomplishments and their 

 correct taste, and making trimmings and embroidering robes with 

 their own aristocratic hands. 



The American woman has no more false shame and silly con- 

 ceit than they had. We can observe her at Paris, Nice, Pau, or 

 in Switzerland, everywhere at ease, the first to laugh at her mis- 

 takes in language, or at her ignorance of continental usages. 

 Wherever she may be she seems to be at home ; and the country 



