Edward C. Towne

“ 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 England 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. ”

“ Young have spoken much more from hasty theory than from any real facts. Dr. Reich has no warrant whatever for asserting a great difference between English and American physical types. The differences are not so much physical as moral, and they are not, with some exceptions, so much differences of type as differences superficially established by habits. If England had had American education and abstinence for the past fifty years, and could learn freedom, equality, and humanity as Americans do, it would be hard to see any great difference between the two peoples. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Reich says of the dryness and heat of America is said ignorantly. Is American air so dry along the Atlantic coast, and within reach of the great line of Northern lakes? The truth is, not that America is too dry, but that England is often not dry enough, and at other times is more dry than America. Dr. Reclam is out of sight of the facts completely when he compares the air of America and its effects to those of heights where lightness and dryness prevail, and thinks Americans characterized by peculiarities such as in Europe he supposes due to the dry northeast wind. ”

“ What Matthew Arnold calls the effusion and the confusion and the vulgarity of the middle-class Englishman, that is, of the average Englishman, is something very much worse than any American development, and, so far as climate plays upon and excites this, England has ten days of irritating rawness, dryness of cold wind, and poison of dust, to one that America has. ”

“ There are numbers of English women, it is true, who show the type, at one extreme, to which Mr. Young refers, but as you go from that extreme to the other you find the middle type as much the rule in England as in America, and the worn, thin, nervous type fully as common in England as in America, and often more extreme here than in America. It is life more than climate which produces this extreme, and life for Englishwomen is worse than American in the whole lower range of society, and in many sections higher up. ”

“ 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 circumstances dominate in the environment of a highly civilized race. ”

“ Americans do not live in dry air. and Englishmen, 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 company generally, apart from the titled ladies, made no approach to a Boston company, but strikingly lacked quality, whether beauty, refinement, or taste. But there was no such contrast as Mr. Young asserts. There is no ground worth speaking of for his statement as to the contrast between English and American women. It is not at all true. I can compare a country village in Massachusetts with one in Yorkshire, and what Mr. Young says of American women lacking or losing form and beauty is more true of the English example than the American. ”

“ In England especially, exaggerated nervous activity and excesses of national 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. ”

“ It seems to me rather a moral survival, one of the signs of barbarism holding on which one so often encounters in England. The habit which many of the working-class have of brutally kicking their wives in the abdomen, and many other forms of British masculine energy, would disappear without reference to climate if education and other moral influences were such as they are in America. ”

“ There is a marked difference, which an Englishman living in America expressed by saying that English women are dowdy compared with American. I should not say this, for it is not true; but it is true that, while cultivated and attractive refinement and taste are the same with women of the superior class in both countries, there is much less diffusion of the influence of this class in England than in America ”

“ Büchner'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. Unfortunately, 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 misunderstood by the English mind. ”

“ Young's Britons can be more easily found; but the type is more conspicuous than it is numerous. Of course, the style of dress, the cut of the beard, and the puff and color given to the face by drink, are not due to climate and are not race-characteristics; yet many not sufficiently instructed observers fail to see that, if they were to deduct these characteristics in the case of many who seem strikingly English, the type would look quite American. ”

“ Young and the authorities quoted by him there is scarce any foundation at all. Study led me to the conviction long since that the general American or Yankee type, in all its varieties, belonged to England as truly as to America, and that the John Bull type is an exceptional one in England, and exclusively English, partly because it never emigrates, and partly because its characteristics are due to English eating and drinking habits. ”

“ It requires a good deal of varied residence 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. ”

“ Young chooses he can see in the north of England a larger proportion of this type than he can find anywhere in America, except those parts of the South where English and Scotch of this type were numerous in the early colonies. Typical skeletons are not made in a day, nor in seven or eight generations. I should say that, across England by Manchester and Sheffield, the "nervous, energetic, large jointed," not stout, not rosy, and most emphatically not phlegmatic men, are ten to one as numerous as anywhere in America. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In figure, stature, and aspect, a body of men in England met for intellectual purposes will rarely suggest any contrast between England and America. At the Royal Academy Exhibition in London on my first visit, when I studied the people rather than the pictures, and at the opening of the new Town Hall in Manchester, where four thousand people in full dress were wandering through the hall, corridors, and state apartments of the vast structure, the great mass of the people were not different from American in any of the respects named by Mr. ”

“ The European hygienists, who are dealing with the subject by means of speculative observations, ought to try a winter and spring in Oldham, 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ One supposes that he has seen nervous energy in Chicago, but only in England have I ever had my attention drawn to nervous energy almost gone mad. The impression that the English are phlegmatic is a false inference from peculiar appearances. ”

“ Young singularly errs in stating that Britons have a stout, fresh, rosy habit, which they directly lose in American air. I am writing where there is a country population of four thousand, and I should make money by giving Mr. ”