FOOTNOTES:

FOOTNOTES:[2]The Boston Subway, opened in 1898, has impaired the truth of this sentence.[3]It is only fair to say that this was originally written in 1893, and that matters have been greatly improved since then.[4]This may be paralleled in Europe: "The Franciscan monks of Bosnia wear long black robes, with rope, black 'bowler hats,' and long and heavy military moustachios (by special permission of the Pope)."—Daily Chronicle, Oct 5, 1895.[5]In the just-ended war with Spain, the United States did not fail to justify its character as the Land of Contrasts. From the wealthy and enlightened United States we should certainly have expected all that money and science could afford in the shape of superior weapons and efficiency of commissariat and medical service, while we could have easily pardoned a little unsteadiness in civilians suddenly turned into soldiers. As a matter of fact, the poverty-stricken Spaniards had better rifles than the Americans; the Commissariat and Medical Departments are alleged to have broken down in the most disgraceful way; the citizen-soldiers behaved like veterans.

[2]The Boston Subway, opened in 1898, has impaired the truth of this sentence.

[3]It is only fair to say that this was originally written in 1893, and that matters have been greatly improved since then.

[4]This may be paralleled in Europe: "The Franciscan monks of Bosnia wear long black robes, with rope, black 'bowler hats,' and long and heavy military moustachios (by special permission of the Pope)."—Daily Chronicle, Oct 5, 1895.

[5]In the just-ended war with Spain, the United States did not fail to justify its character as the Land of Contrasts. From the wealthy and enlightened United States we should certainly have expected all that money and science could afford in the shape of superior weapons and efficiency of commissariat and medical service, while we could have easily pardoned a little unsteadiness in civilians suddenly turned into soldiers. As a matter of fact, the poverty-stricken Spaniards had better rifles than the Americans; the Commissariat and Medical Departments are alleged to have broken down in the most disgraceful way; the citizen-soldiers behaved like veterans.

By "society" I do not mean that limited body which, whether as the Upper Ten Thousand of London or as the Four Hundred of New York, usually arrogates the title. Such narrowness of definition seems peculiarly out of place in the vigorous democracy of the West. By society I understand the great body of fairly well-educated and fairly well-mannered people, whose means and inclinations lead them to associate with each other on terms of equality for the ordinary purposes of good fellowship. Such people, not being fenced in by conventional barriers and owning no special or obtrusive privileges, represent much more fully and naturally the characteristic national traits of their country; and their ways and customs are the most fruitful field for a comparative study of national character. The daughters of dukes and princes can hardly be taken as typical English girls, since the conditions of their life are so vastly different from those of the huge majority of the species—conditions which deny a really natural or normal development to all but the choicest and strongest souls. So the daughter of a New York multimillionaire, who has been brought up to regard a British duke or an Italian prince as her natural partner for life, does not look out on the world throughgenuinely American spectacles, but is biassed by a point of view which may be somewhat paradoxically termed the "cosmopolitan-exclusive." As Mr. Henry James puts it: "After all, what one sees on a Newport piazza is not America; it is the back of Europe."

There are, however, reasons special to the United States why we should not regard the "Newport set" as typical of American society. Illustrious foreign visitors fall not unnaturally into this mistake; even so keen a critic as M. Bourget leans this way, though Mr. Bryce gives another proof of his eminent sanity and good sense by his avoidance of the tempting error. But, as Walt Whitman says, "The pulse-beats of the nation are never to be found in the sure-to-be-put-forward-on-such-occasions citizens." European fashionable society, however unworthy many of its members may be, and however relaxed its rules of admission have become, has its roots in an honourable past; its theory is fine; notallthe big names of the British aristocracy can be traced back to strong ales or weak (Lucy) Waters. Even those who desire the abolition of the House of Peers, or look on it, with Bagehot, as "a vapid accumulation of torpid comfort," cannot deny that it is an institution that has grown up naturally with the country, and that it is only now (if even now) that it is felt with anything like universality to be an anomaly. The American society which is typified by the four hundred of New York, the society which marries its daughters to English peers, is in a very different position. It is of mushroom growth even according to American standards; it has theoretically no right to exist; it is entirely at variance with the spirit of the country and contradictory of its political system; it isalmost solely conditioned by wealth;[6]it is disregarded if not despised by nine-tenths of the population; it does not really count. However seriously the little cliques of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia may take themselves, they are not regarded seriously by the rest of the country in any degree comparable to the attitude of the British Philistine towards the British Barbarian. Without the appropriate background of king and nobility, the whole system is ridiculous; it has nonationalbasis. The source of its honour is ineradicably tainted. It is thereductio ad absurdumof the idea of aristocratic society. It is divorced from the real body of democracy. It sets no authoritative standard of taste. If anything could reconcile the British Radical to his House of Lords, it would be the rankness of taste, the irresponsible freaks of individual caprice, that rule in a country where there is no carefully polished noblesse to set the pattern. George William Curtis puts the case well: "Fine society is no exotic, does not avoid, but all that does not belong to it drops away like water from a smooth statue. We are still peasants and parvenues, although we call each other princes and build palaces. Before we are three centuries old we are endeavouring to surpass, by imitating, the results of all art and civilisation and social genius beyond the sea. By elevating the standard of expense we hope to secure select society, but have only aggravated the necessity of a labour integrally fatal to the kind of society we seek."

It would, of course, be a serious mistake to assumethat, because there are no titles and no theory of caste in the United States, there are no social distinctions worth the trouble of recognition. Besides the crudely obvious elevation of wealth and "smartness" already referred to, there are inner circles of good birth, of culture, and so on, which are none the less practically recognised because they are theoretically ignored. Of such are the old Dutch clans of New York, which still, I am informed, regard families like the Vanderbilts as upstarts and parvenues. In Chicago there is said to be an inner circle of forty or fifty families which is recognised as the "best society," though by no means composed of the richest citizens. In Boston, though the Almighty Dollar now plays a much more important rôle than before, it is still a combination of culture and ancestry that sets the most highly prized hall-mark on the social items. And indeed the heredity of such families as the Quincys, the Lowells, the Winthrops, and the Adamses, which have maintained their superior position for generations, through sheer force of ability and character, without the external buttresses of primogeniture and entail, may safely measure itself against the stained lineage of many European families of high title. The very absence of titular distinction often causes the lines to be more clearly drawn; as Mr. Charles Dudley Warner says: "Popular commingling in pleasure resorts is safe enough in aristocratic countries, but it will not answer in a republic." There is, however, no universal theory that holds good from New York to California; and hence the generalising foreigner is apt to see nothing but practical as well as theoretical equality.

In spite of anything in the foregoing that may seem incompatible, the fact remains that the distinguishing feature of American society, as contrasted with the societies of Europe, is the greater approach to equality that it has made. It is in this sphere, and not in those of industry, law, or politics, that the British observer must feel that the American breathes a distinctly more liberal and democratic air than he. The processes of endosmose and exosmose go on under much freer conditions; the individual particle is much more ready to filtrate up or down to its proper level. Mr. W.D. Howells writes that "once good society contained only persons of noble or gentle birth; then persons of genteel or sacred callings were admitted; now it welcomes to its level everyone of agreeable manners or cultivated mind;" and this, which may be true of modern society in general, is infinitely more true in America than elsewhere. It might almost be asserted that everyone in America ultimately finds his proper social niche; that while many are excluded from the circles for which theythinkthemselves adapted, practically none are shut off from their really harmoniousmilieu. The process of segregation is deprived to a large extent of the disagreeableness consequent upon a rigid table of precedence. Nothing surprises an American more in London society than the uneasy sense of inferiority that many a distinguished man of letters will show in the presence of a noble lord. No amount of philosophy enables one to rise entirely superior to the trammels of early training and hoary association. Even when the great novelist feels himself as at least on a level with his ducal interlocutor, he cannot ignore the fact that his fellow-guests do not sharehis opinion. Now, without going the length of asserting that there is absolutely nothing of this kind in the intercourse of the American author with the American railroad magnate, it may be safely stated that the general tone of society in America makes such an attitude rare and unlikely. There social equality has become an instinct, and the ruling note of good society is of pleasant cameraderie, without condescension on the one hand or fawning on the other. "The democratic system deprives people of weapons that everyone does not equally possess. No one is formidable; no one is on stilts; no one has great pretensions or any recognised right to be arrogant." (Henry James.) The spirit of goodwill, of a desire to make others happy (especially when it does not incommode you to do so), swings through a much larger arc in American society than in English. One can be surer of one's self, without either an overweening self-conceit or the assumption of brassy self-assertion.

The main rock of offence in American society is, perhaps, its tendency to attach undue importance to materialistic effects. Plain living with high thinking is not so much of an American formula as one would wish. In the smart set of New York, and in other placesmutatis mutandis, this shows itself in an appallingly vulgar and ostentatious display of mere purchase power. We are expected to find something grand in the fact that an entertainment costs so much; there is little recognition of the truth that a man who spends $100 where $10 would meet all the demands of good taste is not only a bad economist, but essentially bourgeois andtornéin soul. Even roses are vulgarised, if that be possible, byproduction in the almost obtrusively handsome variety known as the "American Beauty," and by being heaped up like hay-stacks in the reception rooms. At a recent fashionable marriage in New York no fewer than 20,000 sprays of lily of the valley are reported to have been used. A short time ago a wedding party travelled from Chicago to Burlington (Iowa) on a specially constructed train which cost £100,000 to build; the fortunes of the heads of the few families represented aggregated £100,000,000. The private drawing-room cars of millionaires aretoohandsome; they do not indicate so much a necessity of taste as a craving to spend. Many of the best hotels are characterised by a tasteless magnificence which annoys rather than attracts the artistic sense. At one hotel I stayed at in a fashionable watering-place the cheapest bedroom cost £1 a night; but I did not find that its costly tapestry hangings, huge Japanese vases, and elaborately carved furniture helped me to woo sweet slumber any more successfully than the simple equipments of an English village inn. Indeed, they rather suggested insomnia, just as the ominous name of "Macbeth," affixed to one of the bedrooms in the Shakespeare Hotel at Stratford-on-Avon, immediately suggested the line "Macbeth doth murder sleep."

This materialistic tendency, however, which its defenders call a higher standard of comfort, is not confined to the circles of the millionaires; it crops out more or less at all the different levels. Americans seem alittlemore dependent on bodily comforts than Englishmen, alittlemore apt to coddle themselves, alittleless hardy. They are more susceptible to variations of temperature,and hence the prevalent over-heating of their houses, hotels, and railway-cars. A very slight shower will send an American into his overshoes.[7]There is more of a self-conscious effort in the encouragement of manly sports. Americans seldom walk when they can ride. The girls are apt to be annoyed if a pleasure-party be not carried out so as to provide in the fullest way for their personal comfort.

This last sentence suggests a social practice of the United States which, perhaps, may come under the topic we are at present discussing. I mean the custom by which girls allow their young men friends to incur expense in their behalf. I am aware that this custom is on the wane in the older cities, that the most refined girls in all parts of the Union dislike it, that it is "bad form" in many circles. In the bowling-club to which I had the pleasure to belong the ladies paid their subscriptions "like a man;" when I drove out on sleigh-parties, the girls insisted on paying their share of the expense. The fact, however, remains that, speaking generally and taking class for class, the American girl allows her admirers to spend their money on her much more freely than the English girl. A man is considered mean if he does not pay the car-fare of his girl companion; a girl will allow a man who is merely a "friend" to take her to the theatre, fetching her and taking her home in a carriage hired at exorbitant rates. TheIllustrated American(Jan. 19, 1895) writes:

The advanced ideas prevalent in this country regarding the relations of the opposite sexes make it not only proper,but necessary, that a young man with serious intentions shall take his sweetheart out, give her presents, send her flowers, go driving with her, and in numberless little ways incur expense. This is all very delightful for her, but to him it means ruin. And at the end he may find that she was only flirting with him.

In fact, whenever a young man and a young woman are associated in any enterprise, it is quite usual for the young man to pay for both. On the whole, this custom seems an undesirable one. It is so much a matter of habit that the American girl usually plays her part in the matter with absolute innocence and unconsciousness; she feels no more obligation than an English girl would for the opening of a door. The young man also takes it as a matter of course, and does not in the least presume on his services. But still, I think, it has a slight tendency to rub the bloom off what ought to be the most delicate and ethereal form of social intercourse. It favours the well-to-do youth by an additional handicap. It throws another obstacle in the track of poverty and thrift. It is contrary to the spirit of democratic equality; the woman who accepts such attentions is tacitly allowing that she is not on the same footing as man. On reflection it must grate a little on the finest feelings. There seems to me little doubt that it will gradually die out in circles to which it would be strange in Europe.

On the whole, however, even with such drawbacks as the above, the social relationship of the sexes in the United States is one of the many points in which the new surpasses the old. The American girl is throwninto such free and ample relations with the American boy from her earliest youth up that she is very apt to look upon him simply as a girl of a stronger growth. Some such word as the GermanGeschwisteris needed to embrace the "young creatures" who, in petticoats or trousers, form the genuine democracy of American youth. Up to the doors of college, and often even beyond them, the boy and girl have been "co-educated;" at the high school the boy has probably had a woman for his teacher, at least in some branches, up to his sixteenth or seventeenth year. The hours of recreation are often spent in pastimes in which girls may share. In some of the most characteristic of American amusements, such as the "coasting" of winter, girls take a prominent place. There is no effort on the part of elders to play the spy on the meetings of boy or girl, or to place obstacles in their way. They are not thought of as opposite sexes; it is "just all the young people together." The result is a spirit of absolute good comradeship. There is little atmosphere of the unknown or the mysterious about the opposite sex. The love that leads to marriage is thus apt to be the product of a wider experience, and to be based on a more intimate knowledge. The sentimental may cry fie on so clear-sighted a Cupid, but the sensible cannot but rejoice over anything that tends to the undoing of the phrase "lottery of marriage."

That the ideal attitude towards and in marriage has been attained in average American society I should be the last to assert. The way in which American wives leave their husbands toiling in the sweltering city while they themselves fleet the time in Europe would alone give me pause. But I am here concerned with the relativeand not the absolute; and my contention is that the average marriage in America is apt to be made under conditions which, compared with those of other nations, increase the chances of happiness. A great deal has been said and written about the inconsistency of the marriage laws of the different States, and much cheap wit has been fired off at the fatal facility of divorce in the United States; but I could not ascertain from my own observation that these defects touched any very great proportion of the population, or played any larger part in American society, as I have defined it, than the differences between the marriage laws of England and Scotland do in our own island. M. Bourget, quite arbitrarily and (I think) with a trace of the proverbial Gallic way of looking at the relations of the sexes, has attributed the admitted moral purity of the atmosphere of American society to the coldness of the American temperament and thesera juvenum Venus. It seems to me, however, that there is no call to disparage American virtue by the suggestion of a constitutional want of liability to temptation, and that Mark Twain, in his somewhat irreverent rejoinder, is much nearer the mark when he attributes the prevalent sanctity of the marriage tie to the fact that the husbands and wives have generally married each other for love. This is undoubtedly the true note of America in this particular, though it may not be unreservedly characteristic of the smart set of New York. If the sacred flame of Cupid could be exposed to the alembic of statistics, I should be surprised to hear that the love matches of the United States did not reach a higher percentage than those of any other nation. One certainly meets more husbandsand wives of mature age who seem thoroughly to enjoy each other's society.

There is a certain "snap" to American society that is not due merely to a sense of novelty, and does not wholly wear off through familiarity. The sense of enjoyment is more obvious and more evenly distributed; there is a general willingness to be amused, a general absence of theblasé. Even Matthew Arnold could not help noticing the "buoyancy, enjoyment, and freedom from restraint which are everywhere in America," and which he accounted for by the absence of the aristocratic incubus. The nervous fluid so characteristic of America in general flows briskly in the veins of its social organism; the feeling is abroad that what is worth doing is worth doing well. There is a more general ability than we possess to talk brightly on the topics of the moment; there is less lingering over one subject; there is a constant savour of the humorous view of life. The more even distribution of comfort in the United States (becoming, alas! daily less characteristic) adds largely to the pleasantness of society by minimising the semi-conscious feeling of remorse in playing while the "other half" starves. The inherent inability of the American to understand that there is any "higher" social order than his own minimises the feeling of envy of those "above" him. "How dreadful," says the Englishman to the American girl, "to be governed by men to whom you would not speak!" "Yes," is the rejoinder, "and how delightful to be governed by men who won't speak to you!" From this latter form of delight American society is free. Henry James strikes a true note when he makes Miranda Hope (in "A Bundle of Letters")describe the fashionable girl she met at a Paris pension as "like the people they call 'haughty' in books," and then go on to say, "I have never seen anyone like that before—anyone that wanted to make a difference." And her feeling of impersonal interest in the phenomenon is equally characteristic. "She seemed to me so like a proud young lady in a novel. I kept saying to myself all day, 'haughty, haughty,' and I wished she would keep on so." Too much stress cannot easily be laid on this feeling of equality in the air as a potent enhancer of the pleasure of society. To feel yourself patronised—even, perhaps especially, when you know yourself to be in all respects the superior of the patroniser—may tickle your sense of humour for a while, but in the long run it is distinctly dispiriting. The philosopher, no doubt, is or should be able to disregard the petty annoyances arising from an ever-present consciousness of social limitation, but society is not entirely composed of philosophers, even in America; and the sense of freedom and space is unqualifiedly welcome to its members. It is not easy for a European to the manner born to realise the sort of extravagant, nightmare effect that many of our social customs have in the eyes of our untutored American cousins. The inherent absurdities that are second nature to us exhale for them the full flavour of their grotesqueness. The idea of an insignificant boy peer taking precedence of Mr. John Morley! The idea ofhavingto appear before royalty in a state of partial nudity on a cold winter day! The necessity of backing out of the royal presence! The idea of a freeborn Briton having to get out of an engagement long previously formed on the score that"he has beencommandedto dine with H.R.H." The horrible capillary plaster necessary before a man can serve decently as an opener of carriage-doors! The horsehair envelopes without which our legal brains cannot work! The unwritten law by which a man has to nurse his hat and stick throughout a call unless his hostess specially asks him to lay them aside!

Mr. Bryce commits himself to the assertion that "Scotchmen and Irishmen are more unlike Englishmen, the native of Normandy more unlike the native of Provence, the Pomeranian more unlike the Wurtemberger, the Piedmontese more unlike the Neapolitan, the Basque more unlike the Andalusian, than the American from any part of the country is to the American from any other." Max O'Rell, on the other hand, writes: "L'habitant du Nord-est des Etats Unis, le Yankee, diffère autant de l'Americain de l'Ouest et du Midi que l'Anglais diffère de l'Allemand ou de l'Espagnol." On this point I find myself far more in accord with the French than with the British observer, though, perhaps, M. Blouët rather overstates his case. Wider differences among civilised men can hardly be imagined than those which subsist between the creole of New Orleans and the Yankee of Maine, the Kentucky farmer and the Michigan lumberer. It is, however, true that there is a distinct tendency for the stamp of the Eastern States to be applied to the inhabitants of the cities, at least, of the West. The founders of these cities are so largely men of Eastern birth, the means of their expansion are so largely advanced by Eastern capitalists, that this tendency is easily explicable. [So far as my observation went it was to Boston rather than to New York or Philadelphiathat the educated classes of the Western cities looked as the cynosure of their eyes. Boston seemed to stand for something less material than these other cities, and the subtler nature of its influence seemed to magnify its pervasive force.] None the less do the people of the United States, compared with those of any one European country, seem to me to have their due share of variety and even of picturesqueness. This latter quality is indeed denied to the United States not only by European visitors, but also by many Americans. This denial, however, rests on a limited and traditional use of the word picturesque. America has not the European picturesqueness of costume, of relics of the past, of the constant presence of the potential foeman at the gate. But apart altogether from the almost theatrical romance of frontier life and the now obsolescent conflict with the aborigines, is there not some element of the picturesque in the processes of readjustment by which the emigrants of European stock have adapted themselves and are adapting themselves to the conditions of the New World? In some ways the nineteenth century is the most romantic of all; and the United States embody and express it as no other country. Is there not a picturesque side to the triumph of civilisation over barbarism? Is there nothing of the picturesque in the long thin lines of gleaming steel, thrown across the countless miles of desert sand and alkali plain, and in the mighty mass of metal with its glare of cyclopean eye and its banner of fire-illumined smoke, that bears the conquerors of stubborn nature from side to side of the great continent? Is there not an element of the picturesque in the struggles of the Western farmer? Cananything be finer in its way than a night view of Pittsburg—that "Hell with its lid off," where the cold gleam of electricity vies with the lurid glare of the furnaces and smelting works? I say nothing of the Californian Missions; of the sallow creoles of New Orleans with their gorgeous processions of Mardi-Gras; or of the almost equally fantastic fête of the Veiled Prophet of St. Louis; or of the lumberers of Michigan; or of the Mexicans of Arizona; or of the German beer-gardens of Chicago; or of the swinging lanterns and banners of Chinatown in San Francisco and Mott street in New York; or of the Italians of Mulberry Bend in the latter city; or of the alternating stretches on a long railway journey of forest and prairie, yellow corn-fields and sandy desert; or of many other classes and conditions which are by no means void of material for the artist in pen or brush. All these lend hues that are anything but prosaic to my kaleidoscopic recollections of the United States; but more than all these,thecharacteristically picturesque feature of American life, stands out the omnipresent negro. It was a thrill to have one's boots blackened by a coloured "professor" in an alley-way of Boston, and to hear his richly intoned "as shoh's you're bawn." It was a delight to see the negro couples in the Public Garden, conducting themselves and their courting, as Mr. Howells has well remarked, with infinitely more restraint and refinement than their Milesian compeers, or to see them passing out of the Charles-street Church in all the Sunday bravery of broadcloth coats, shiny hats, wonderfully laundered skirts of snowy whiteness, and bodices of all the hues of the rainbow. And all through the Union their glossy black faces and gleaming white teeth shed a kindof dusky radiance over the traveller's path. Who but can recall with gratitude the expansive geniality and reassuring smile of the white-coated negro waiter, as compared with the supercilious indifference, if not positive rudeness, of his pale colleague? And what will ever efface the mental kodak of George (not Sambo any more) shuffling rapidly into the dining-room, with his huge flat palm inverted high over his head and bearing a colossal tray heaped up with good things for the guest under his charge? And shall I ever forget the grotesque gravity of the negro brakeman in Louisiana, with his tall silk hat? or the pair of gloves pathetically shared between two neatly dressed negro youths in a railway carriage in Georgia? or the pickaninnies slumbering sweetly in old packing-cases in a hut at Jacksonville, while their father thrummed the soft guitar with friendly grin? It has always seemed to me a reproach to American artists that they fill the air with sighs over the absence of the picturesque in the United States, while almost totally overlooking the fine flesh-tones and gay dressing of the coloured brother at their elbow.

The most conventional society of America is apt to be more or less shrouded by the pall of monotony that attends convention elsewhere, but typical American society—the society of the great mass of Americans—shows distinctly more variety than that of England. In social meetings, as in business, the American is ever on the alert for some new thing: and the brain of every pretty girl is cudgelled in order to provide some novelty for her next party. Hence the progressive euchre, the "library" parties, the "shadow" dances, the conversation parties, and the long series of ingenious games, theadoption of which, for some of us at least, has done much to lighten the deadly dulness of English "small and earlies." Even the sacro-sanctity of whist has not been respected, and the astonished shade of Hoyle has to look on at his favourite game in the form of "drive" and "duplicate." The way in which whist has been taken up in the United States is a good example of the national unwillingness to remain in the ruts of one's ancestors. Possibly the best club-players of England are at least as good as the best Americans, but the general average of play and the general interest in the game are distinctly higher in the United States. Every English whist-player with any pretension to science knows what he has to expect when he finds an unknown lady as his partner, especially if she is below thirty; but in America he will often find himself "put to his trumps" by a bright girl in her teens. The girls in Boston and other large cities have organised afternoon whist-clubs, at which all the "rigour of the game" is observed. Many of them take regular lessons from whist experts; and among the latter themselves are not a few ladies, who find the teaching of their favourite game a more lucrative employment than governessing or journalism. Even so small a matter as the eating of ice-cream may illustrate the progressive nature of American society. Elderly Americans still remember the time when it was usual to eat this refreshing delicacy out of economical wine-glasses such as we have still to be content with in England. But now-a-days no American expects or receives less than a heaping saucer of ice-cream at a time.

Americans are born dancers; they have far morequicksilver in their feet than their English cousins. Perhaps the very best waltzers I have ever danced with were English girls, who understood the poetry of the art and knew how to reflect not merely the time of the music, but itsnuancesof rhythm and tone. But dancers such as these are like fairies' visits, that come but once or twice in a lifetime; and a large proportion of English girls dance very badly. In America one seldom or never finds a girl who cannot dance fairly, and most of them can claim much warmer adverbs than that. The American invention of "reversing" is admirable in its unexaggerated form, but requires both study and practice; and the reason that it was voted "bad form" in England was simply that the indolence of the gilded youth prevented him ever taking the trouble to master it. Our genial satiristPunchhit the nail on the head: "Shall we—eh—reverse, Miss Lilian?" "Reverse, indeed; it's as much as you can do to keep on your legs as it is."

One custom at American dances struck me as singularly stupid and un-American in its inelasticity. I know not how widespread it is, or how fashionable, but it reigned in circles which seemed to my unsophisticated eyes quitecomme il faut. The custom is that by which a man having once asked a lady to dance becomes responsible for her until someone else offers himself as her partner. It probably arose from the chivalrous desire not to leave any girl partnerless, but in practice it works out quite the other way. When a man realises that hemayhave to retain the same partner for several dances, or even for the greater part of the evening, he will, unless he is a Bayard absolutelysans peur et sans reproche, naturally think twice of engaging a lady fromwhom his release is problematical. Hence the tendency is to increase the triumphs of the belle, and decrease the chances of the less popular maiden. It is also extremely uncomfortable for a girl to feel that a man has (to use the ugly slang of the occasion) "got stuck" with her; and it takes more adroitness and self-possession than any young girl can be expected to possess to extricate herself neatly from the awkward position. Another funny custom at subscription balls of a very respectable character is that many of the matrons wear their bonnets throughout the evening. But this, perhaps, is not stranger than the fact that ladies wear hats in the theatre, while the men who accompany them are in evening dress—a curious habit which to the uninitiated observer would suggest that the nymphs belonged to a less fashionable stratum than their attendant swains. A parallel instance is that of afternoon receptions, where the hostess and her myrmidons appear in ball costume, while the visitors are naturally in the toilette of the street. The contrast thus evolved of low necks and heavy furs is often very comical. The British convention by which the hostess always dresses as plainly as possible so as to avoid the chance of eclipsing any of her guests, and so chooses tobriller par sa simplicité, is in other cases also more honoured in the breach than in the observance in America.

A very characteristic little piece of the social democracy of America is seen at its best in Chicago, though not unknown in other large cities. On the evening of a hot summer day cushions and rugs are spread on the front steps of the houses, and the occupants take possession of these, the men to enjoy their after-dinnercigars, the women to talk and scan the passers-by. The general effect is very genial and picturesque, and decidedly suggestive of democratic sociability. The same American indifference to the exaggerated British love of privacy which leads John Bull to enclose his fifty-foot-square garden by a ten-foot wall is shown in the way in which the gardens of city houses are left unfenced. Nothing can be more attractive in its way than such a street as Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, where the pretty villas stand in unenclosed gardens, and the verdant lawns melt imperceptibly into each other without advertisement of where one leaves off and the other begins, while the fronts towards the street are equally exposed. The general effect is that of a large and beautiful park dotted with houses. The American is essentially gregarious in his instinct, and the possession of a vast feudal domain, with a high wall round it, can never make up to him for the excitement of near neighbours. It may seriously be doubted whether the American millionaire who buys a lordly demesne in England is not doing violence to his natural and national tastes every day that he inhabits it.

FOOTNOTES:[6]Mrs. Burton Harrison reports that a young New York matron said to her, "Really, now that society in New York is getting so large, one must draw the line somewhere; after this I shall visit and invite only those who have more than five millions."[7]I have seen a brakeman on a passenger train wear overshoes on a showery day, though his duties hardly ever compelled him to leave the covered cars.

[6]Mrs. Burton Harrison reports that a young New York matron said to her, "Really, now that society in New York is getting so large, one must draw the line somewhere; after this I shall visit and invite only those who have more than five millions."

[7]I have seen a brakeman on a passenger train wear overshoes on a showery day, though his duties hardly ever compelled him to leave the covered cars.

Compared to the appearance of the American girl in books written about the United States, that of Charles I.'s head in Mr. Dick's memorial might perhaps be almost called casual. All down the literary ladder, from the weighty tomes of a Professor Bryce to the witty persiflage of a Max O'Rell, we find a considerable part of every rung occupied by the skirts appropriated to the gentler sex; and—what is, perhaps, stranger still—she holds her own even in books written by women. It need not be asserted that all the references to her are equally agreeable. That amiable critic, Sir Lepel Griffin, alludes to her only to assure us that "he had never met anyone who had lived long or travelled much in America who did not hold that female beauty in the States is extremely rare, while the average of ordinary good looks is unusually low," and even visitors of an infinitely more subtle and discriminating type, such as M. Bourget, mingle not a little vinegar with their syrup of appreciation. But the fact remains that almost every book on the United States contains a chapter devoted explicitly to the female citizen; and the inevitableness of the record must have some solid ground of reason behind or below it. It indicates a vein of unusual significance, or at the very least of unusual conspicuousness, in the phenomenon thustreated of. Observers have usually found it possible to write books on the social and economical traits of other countries without a parade of petticoats in the head-lines. This is not to say that one can ignore one-half of society in writing of it; but if you search the table of contents of such books as Mr. Philip Hamerton's charming "French and English," or Mr. T.H.S. Escott's "England: Its People, Polity, and Pursuits," you will not find the words "woman" or "girl," or any equivalent for them. But the writer on the United States seems irresistibly compelled to give woman all that coördinate importance which is implied by the prominence of capital letters and separate chapters.

This predominance of woman in books on America is not by any means a phase of the "woman question," technically so called. It has no direct reference to the woman as voter, as doctor, as lawyer, as the competitor of man; the subject of interest is woman as woman, theDing an sichof German philosophical slang. No doubt the writer may have occasion to allude to Dr. Mary Walker, to the female mayors of Wyoming, to the presidential ambitions of Mrs. Belva Lockwood; but these are mere adjuncts, not explanations, of the question under consideration. The European visitor to the United Stateshasto write about American women because they bulk so largely in his view, because they seem essentially so prominent a feature of American life; because theirrelativeimportance and interest impress him as greater than those of women in the lands of the Old World, because they seem to him to embody in so eminent a measure that intangible quality of Americanism, the existence, or indeed the possibility, of which is so hotly denied by some Americans.

Indeed, those who look upon the prominent rôle of the American woman merely as one phase of the "new woman" question—merely as the inevitable conspicuousness of woman intruding on what has hitherto been exclusively the sphere of man—are many degrees beside the point. The American note is as obvious in the girl who has never taken the slightest interest in polities, the professions, or even the bicycle, as in Dr. Mary Walker or Mrs. Lockwood. The prevalent English idea of the actual interference of the American woman in public life is largely exaggerated. There are, for instance, in Massachusetts 625,000 women entitled to vote for members of the school committees; and the largest actual vote recorded is 20,140. Of 175,000 women of voting age in Connecticut the numbers who used their vote in the last three years were 3,806, 3,241, and 1,906. These, if any, are typical American States; and there is not the shadow of a doubt that the 600,000 women who stayed at home are quite as "American" as the 20,000 who went to the poll. The sphere of the American woman's influence and the reason of her importance lie behind politics and publicity.

It seems a reasonable assumption that the formation of the American girl is due to the same large elemental causes that account for American phenomena generally; and herrelativestrikingness may be explained by the reflection that there was more room for these great forces to work in the case of woman than in the case of man. The Englishman, for instance, through his contact with public life and affairs, through his wider experience, through his rubbing shoulders with more varied types, had already been prepared for the working of Americanconditions in a way that his more sheltered womankind had not been. In the bleaching of the black and the grey, the change will be the more striking in the former; the recovery of health will be conspicuous in proportion to the gravity of the disease. America has meant opportunity for women even more in some ways than for men. The gap between them has been lessened in proportion as the gap between the American and the European has widened. The average American woman is distinctly more different from her average English sister than is the case with their respective brothers. The training of the English girl starts from the very beginning on a different basis from that of the boy; she is taught to restrain her impulses, while his are allowed much freer scope; the sister is expected to defer to the brother from the time she can walk or talk. In America this difference of training is constantly tending to the vanishing point. The American woman has never learned to play second fiddle. The American girl, as Mr. Henry James says, is rarely negative; she is either (and usually) a most charming success or (and exceptionally) a most disastrous failure. The pathetic army of ineffective spinsters clinging apologetically to the skirts of gentility is conspicuous by its absence in America. The conditions of life there encourage a girl to undertake what she can do best, with a comparatively healthy disregard of its fancied "respectability." Her consciousness of efficiency reacts in a thousand ways; her feet are planted on so solid a foundation that she inevitably seems an important constructive part of society. The contrast between the American woman and the English woman in this respectmay be illustrated by the two Caryatides in the Braccio Nuovo at the Vatican. The first of these, a copy of one of the figures of the Erechtheum, seems to bear the superincumbent architrave easily and securely, with her feet planted squarely and the main lines running vertically. In the other, of a later period, the fact that the feet are placed close together gives an air of insecurity to the attitude, an effect heightened by the prevalence of curved lines in the folds of the drapery.

The American woman, too, has had more time than the American man to cultivate the more amiable—if you will, the more showy—qualities of American civilisation. The leisured class of England consists of both sexes, that of America practically of one only. The problem of the American man so far has mainly been to subdue a new continent to human uses, while the woman has been sacrificing on the altar of the Graces. Hence the wider culture and the more liberal views are often found in the sex from which the European does not expect them; hence the woman of New York and other American cities is often conspicuously superior to her husband in looks, manners, and general intelligence. This has been denied by champions of the American man; but the observation of the writer, whatever it may be worth, would deny the denial.

The way in which an expression such as "Ladies' Cabin" is understood in the United States has always seemed to me very typical of the position of the gentler sex in that country. In England, when we see an inscription of that kind, we assume that the enclosure referred to is for ladiesonly. In America, unless the "only" is emphasized, the "Ladies' Drawing Room"or the "Ladies' Waiting Room" extends its hospitality to all those of the male sex who are ready to behave as gentlemen and temporarily forego the delights of tobacco. Thus half of the male passengers of the United States journey, as it were, under the ægis of woman, and think it no shame to be enclosed in a box labelled with her name.

Put roughly, what chiefly strikes the stranger in the American woman is her candour, her frankness, her hail-fellow-well-met-edness, her apparent absence of consciousness of self or of sex, her spontaneity, her vivacity, her fearlessness. If the observer himself is not of a specially refined or delicate type, he is apt at first to misunderstand the cameraderie of an American girl, to see in it suggestions of a possible coarseness of fibre. If a vain man, he may take it as a tribute to his personal charms, or at least to the superior claims of a representative of old-world civilisation. But even to the obtuse stranger of this character it will ultimately become obvious—as to the more refined observerab initio—that he can no more (if as much) dare to take a liberty with the American girl than with his own countrywoman. The plum may appear to be more easily handled, but its bloom will be found to be as intact and as ethereal as in the jealously guarded hothouse fruit of Europe. He will find that her frank and charming companionability is as far removed from masculinity as from coarseness; that the points in which she differs from the European lady do not bring her nearer either to a man on the one hand, or to a common woman on the other. He will find that he has to readjust his standards, to see that divergence from thebest type of woman hitherto known to him does not necessarily mean deterioration; if he is of an open and susceptible mind, he may even come to the conclusion that he prefers the transatlantic type!

Unless his lines in England have lain inverypleasant places, the intelligent Englishman in enjoying his first experience of transatlantic society will assuredly be struck by the sprightliness, the variety, the fearless individuality of the American girl, by her power of repartee, by the quaint appositeness of her expressions, by the variety of her interests, by the absence of undue deference to his masculine dignity. If in his newly landed innocence he ventures to compliment the girl he talks with on the purity of her English, and assumes that she differs in that respect from her companions, she will patriotically repel the suggested accusation of her countrywomen by assuring him, without the ghost of a smile, "that she has had special advantages, inasmuch as an English missionary had been stationed near her tribe." If she prefers Martin Tupper to Shakespeare, or Strauss to Beethoven, she will say so without a tremor. Why should she hypocritically subordinate her personal instincts to a general theory of taste? Her independence is visible in her very dress; she wears what she thinks suits her (and her taste is seldom at fault), not merely what happens to be the fashionable freak of the moment. What Englishman does not shudder when he remembers how each of his womankind—the comely and the homely, the short and the long, the stout and the lean—at once assumed the latest form of hat, apparently utterly oblivious to the question of whether it suited her special style of beautyor not? Now, an American girl is not built that way. She wishes to be in the fashion just as much as she can; but if a special item of fashion does not set her off to advantage, she gracefully and courageously resigns it to those who can wear it with profit. But honour where honour is due! The English girl generally shows more sense of fitness in the dress for walking and travelling; she, consciously or unconsciously, realises that adaptability for its practical purpose is essential in such a case.

The American girl, as above said, strikes one as individual, as varied. In England when we meet a girl in a ball-room we can generally—not always—"place" her after a few minutes' talk; she belongs to a set of which you remember to have already met a volume or two. In some continental countries the patterns in common use seem reduced to three or four. In the United States every new girl is a new sensation. Society consists of a series of surprises. Expectation is continually piqued. A and B and C do not help you to induce D; when you reach Z youmayimagine you find a slight trace of reincarnation. Not that the surprises are invariably pleasant. The very force and self-confidence of the American girl doubly and trebly underline the undesirable. Vulgarity that would be stolid and stodgy in Middlesex becomes blatant and aggressive in New York.

The American girl is not hampered by the feeling of class distinction, which has for her neither religious nor historical sanction. The English girl is first the squire's daughter, second a good churchwoman, third an English subject, and fourthly a woman. Even the best ofthem cannot rise wholly superior to the all-pervading, and, in its essence, vulgarising, superstition that some of her fellow-creatures are not fit to come between the wind and her nobility. Those who reject the theory do so by a self-conscious effort which in itself is crude and a strain. The American girl is, however, born into an atmosphere of unconsciousness of all this, and, unless she belongs to a very narrow coterie, does not reach this point of view either as believer or antagonist. This endues her, at her best, with a sweet and subtle fragrance of humanity that is, perhaps, unique. Free from any sense of inherited or conventional superiority or inferiority, as devoid of the brutality of condescension as of the meanness of toadyism, she combines in a strangely attractive way the charm of eternal womanliness with the latest aroma of a progressive century. It is, doubtless, this quality that M. Bourget has in view when he speaks of the incomparable delicacy of the American girl, or M. Paul Blouët when he asserts that "you find in the American woman a quality which, I fear, is beginning to disappear in Paris and is almost unknown in London—a kind of spiritualised politeness, a tender solicitude for other people, combined with strong individuality."

There is one type of girl, with whom even the most modest and most moderately eligible of bachelors must be familiar in England, who is seldom in evidence in the United States—she whom the American aborigines might call the "Girl-Anxious-to-be-Married." What right-minded man in any circle of British society has not shuddered at the open pursuit of young Croesus? Have not our novelists and satirists reaped the mostample harvest from the pitiable spectacle and all its results? A large part of the advantage that American society has over English rests in the comparative absence of this phenomenon. Man there does not and cannot bear himself as the cynosure of the female eye; the art of throwing the handkerchief has not been included in his early curriculum. The American dancing man does not dare to arrive just in time for supper or to lounge in the doorway while dozens of girls line the walls in faded expectation of a waltz. The English girl herself can hardly be blamed for this state of things. She has been brought up to think that marriage is the be-all and end-all of her existence. "For my part," writes the author of "Cecil, the Coxcomb," "I never blame them when I see them capering and showing off their little monkey-tricks, for conquest. The fault is none of theirs. It is part of an erroneous system." Lady Jeune expresses the orthodox English position when she asserts flatly that "to deny that marriage is the object of woman's existence is absurd." The anachronistic survival of the laws of primogeniture and entail practically makes the marriage of the daughter the only alternative for a descent to a lower sphere of society. In the United States the proportion of girls who strike one as obvious candidates for marriage is remarkably small. Thismaybe owing to the art with which the American woman conceals her lures, but all the evidence points to its being in the main an entirely natural and unconscious attitude. The American girl has all along been so accustomed to associate on equal terms with the other sex that she naturally and inevitably regards him more in the light of a comrade than of a possiblehusband. She has so many resources, and is so independent, that marriage does not bound her horizon.

Her position, however, is not one of antagonism to marriage. If it were, I should be the last to commend it. It rather rests on an assurance of equality, on the assumption that marriage is an honourable estate—a rounding and completing of existence—for man as much as for woman. Nor does it mean, I think, any lack of passion and the deepest instincts of womanhood. All these are present and can be wakened by the right man at the right time. Indeed, the very fact that marriage (with or without love) is not incessantly in the foreground of an American girl's consciousness probably makes the awakening all the more deep and tender because comparatively unanticipated and unforeseen.

The marriages between American heiresses and European peers do not militate seriously against the above view of American marriage. It cannot be sufficiently emphasised that the doings of a few wealthy people in New York are not characteristic of American civilisation. The New YorkTimeswas entirely right when it said, in commenting upon the frank statement of the bridegroom in a recent alliance of this kind that it had beenarrangedby friends of both parties: "A few years ago this frankness would have cost him his bride, if his 'friends' had chosen an American girl for that distinction, and even now it would be resented to the point of a rupture of the engagement by most American girls."

The American girl may not be in reality better educated than her British sister, nor a more profound thinker; but her mind is indisputably more agile and elastic. In fact, a slow-going Britisher has to go througha regular course of training before he can follow the rapid transitions of her train of associations. She has the happiest faculty in getting at another's point of view and in putting herself in his place. Her imagination is more likely to be over-active than too sluggish. One of the most popular classes of the "Society for the Encouragement of Study at Home" is that devoted to imaginary travels in Europe. She is wonderfully adaptable, and makes herself at ease in an entirely strangemilieualmost before the transition is complete. Both M. Blouët and M. Bourget notice this, and claim that it is a quality she shares with the Frenchwoman. The wife of a recent President is a stock illustration of it—a girl who was transferred in a moment from what we should call a quiet "middle-class" existence to the apex of publicity, and comported herself in the most trying situations with the ease, dignity, unconsciousness, taste, and graciousness of a born princess.

The innocence of the American girl is neither an affectation, nor a prejudiced fable, nor a piece of stupidity. The German woman, quoted by Mr. Bryce, found her American compeerfurchtbar frei, but she had at once to addund furchtbar fromm. "The innocence of the American girl passes abysses of obscenity without stain or knowledge." She may be perfectly able to hold her own under any circumstances, but she has little of that detestable quality which we call "knowing." The immortal Daisy Miller is a charming illustration of this. I used sometimes to get into trouble with American ladies, who "hoped I did not take Daisy Miller as a type of the average American girl," by assuring them that "I did not—that I thought her much too good for that." Andin truth there seemed to me a lack of subtlety in the current appreciation of the charming young lady from Schenectady, who is muchfinerthan many readers give her credit for. And on this point I think I may cite Mr. Henry James himself as a witness on my side, since, in a dramatic version of the tale published in theAtlantic Monthly(Vol. 51, 1883), he makes his immaculate Bostonian, Mr. Winterbourne, marry Daisy with a full consciousness of all she was and had been. As I understand her, Miss Daisy Miller, in spite of her somewhat unpropitious early surroundings, was a young woman entirely able to appreciate the very best when she met it. She at once recognised the superiority of Winterbourne to the men she had hitherto known, and she also recognised that her "style" was not the "style" of him or of his associates. But she was very young, and had all the unreasonable pride of extreme youth; and so she determined not to alter her behaviour one jot or tittle in order to attract him—nay, with a sort of bravado, she exaggerated those very traits which she knew he disliked. Yet all the time she had the highest appreciation of his most delicate refinements, while she felt also that he ought to see that at bottom she was just as refined as he, though her outward mask was not so elegant. I have no doubt whatever that, as Mrs. Winterbourne, she adapted herself to her newmilieuwith absolute success, and yet without loss of her own most fascinating individuality.[8]

The whole atmosphere of the country tends to preserve the spirit of unsuspecting innocence in the American maiden. The function of a chaperon is very differently interpreted in the United States and in England. On one occasion I met in a Pullman car a young lady travelling in charge of her governess. A chance conversation elicited the fact that she was the daughter of a well-known New York banker; and the fact that we had some mutual acquaintances was accepted as all-sufficing credentials for my respectability. We had happened to fix on the same hotel at our destination; and in the evening, after dinner, I met in the corridor the staid and severe-lookinggouvernante, who saluted me with "Oh, Mr. Muirhead, I have such a headache! Would you mind going out with my little girl while she makes some purchases?" I was a little taken aback at first; but a moment's reflection convinced me that I had just experienced a most striking tribute to the honour of the American man and the social atmosphere of the United States.

The psychological method of suggestive criticism has, perhaps, never been applied with more delicacy of intelligence than in M. Bourget's chapter on the American woman. Each stroke of the pen, or rather each turn of the scalpel, amazes us by its keen penetration. As we at last close the book and meditate on what we have read, it is little by little borne in upon us that though due tribute is paid to the charming traits of the American woman, yet the general outcome of M. Bourget's analysis is truly damnatory. If this sprightly, fascinating, somewhat hard and calculating young woman be a true picture of the transatlantic maiden, we may sigh indeedfor her lack of theEwig Weibliche. I do not pretend to say where M. Bourget's appreciation is at fault, but that it is false—unaccountably false—in the general impression it leaves, I have no manner of doubt. Perhaps his attention has been fixed too exclusively on the Newport girl, who, it must again be insisted on, is too much impregnated with cosmopolitanfin de siècle-ismto be taken as the American type. Botanise a flower, use the strongest glasses you will, tear apart and name and analyse,—the result is a catalogue, the flower with its beauty and perfume is not there. So M. Bourget has catalogued the separate qualities of the American woman; as a whole she has eluded his analysis. Perhaps this chapter of his may be taken as an eminent illustration of the limitations of the critical method, which is at times so illuminating, while at times it so utterly fails to touch the heart of things, or, better, the wholeness of things.

Among the most searching tests of the state of civilisation reached by any country are the character of its roads, its minimising of noise, and the position of its women. If the United States does not stand very high on the application of the first two tests, its name assuredly leads all the rest in the third. In no other country is the legal status of women so high or so well secured, or their right to follow an independent career so fully recognised by society at large. In no other country is so much done to provide for their convenience and comfort. All the professions are open to them, and the opportunity has widely been made use of. Teaching, lecturing, journalism, preaching, and the practice of medicine have long been recognised as within woman'ssphere, and she is by no means unknown at the bar. There are eighty qualified lady doctors in Boston alone, and twenty-five lady lawyers in Chicago. A business card before me as I write reads, "Mesdames Foster & Steuart, Members of the Cotton Exchange and Board of Trade, Real Estate and Stock Brokers, 143 Main Street, Houston, Texas." The American woman, however, is often found in still more unexpected occupations. There are numbers of women dentists, barbers, and livery-stable keepers. Miss Emily Faithful saw a railway pointswoman in Georgia; and one of the regular steamers on Lake Champlain, when I was there, was successfully steered by a pilot in petticoats. There is one profession that is closed to women in the United States—that of barmaid. That professional association of woman with man when he is apt to be in his most animal moods is firmly tabooed in America—all honour to it!

The career of a lady whose acquaintance I made in New York, and whom I shall call Miss Undereast, illustrates the possibilities open to the American girl. Born in Iowa, Miss Undereast lost her mother when she was three years old, and spent her early childhood in company with her father, who was a travelling geologist and mining prospector. She could ride almost before she could walk, and soon became an expert shot. Once, when only ten years of age, she shot down an Indian who was in the act of killing a white woman with his tomahawk; and on another occasion, when her father's camp was surrounded by hostile Indians, she galloped out upon her pony and brought relief. "She was so much at home with the shy, wild creatures of the woods that she learnedtheir calls, and they would come to her like so many domestic birds and animals. She would come into camp with wild birds and squirrels on her shoulder. She could lasso a steer with the best of them. When, at last, she went to graduate at the State University of Colorado, she paid for her last year's tuition with the proceeds of her own herd of cattle." After graduating at Colorado State University, she took a full course in a commercial college, and then taught school for some time at Denver. Later she studied and taught music, for which she had a marked gift. The next important step brought her to New York, where she gained in a competitive examination the position of secretary in the office of the Street Cleaning Department. Her linguistic accomplishments (for she had studied several foreign languages) stood her in good stead, and during the illness of her chief she practically managed the department and "bossed" fifteen hundred Italian labourers in their own tongue. Miss Undereast carried on her musical studies far enough to be offered a position in an operatic company, while her linguistic studies qualified her for the post of United States Custom House Inspectress. Latterly she has devoted her time mainly to journalism and literature, producing,inter alia, a guidebook to New York, a novel, and a volume of essays on social topics. It is a little difficult to realise when talking with the accomplished and womanlylittérateurthat she has been in her day a slayer of Indians and "a mighty huntress before the Lord;" but both the facts and the opportunities underlying them testify in the most striking manner to the largeness of the sphere of action open to thepuella Americana.

If American women have been well treated by their men-folk, they have nobly discharged their debt. It is trite to refer to the numerous schemes of philanthropy in which American women have played so prominent a part, to allude to the fact that they have as a body used their leisure to cultivate those arts and graces of life which the preoccupation of man has led him too often to neglect. This chapter may well close with the words of Professor Bryce: "No country seems to owe more to its women than America does, nor to owe to them so much of what is best in its social institutions and in the beliefs that govern conduct."

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