rdly venture to deny, among the Teutons, the
very Saxons themselves. Who has not seen French women and French men,
Italians, Spaniards, Russians, Poles, Irish, and even Germans of both
sexes, distinguished by striking and captivating personal beauty both
of face and figure? But the average beauty of the English race appears
to be in a marked degree above that of all others. Among a thousand men
and women of that race there will not only be found more "beauties"
than among the same number of other races, but the majority will be
handsomer, "finer," more symmetrically formed, better featured, with
clearer skins, and a more dignified bearing and presence than the
majority of any other European race with which they may be compared.

A notion was for some time in vogue that this English distinction did
not obtain in America, but that the race had degenerated here. It was a
mere notion, having its origin in a prejudiced perversion of isolated
facts; in the desire of book-writing travellers to find something
strange, and also derogatory, with which to spice their pages; and in a
craving, which amounts to a mild insanity, among European people, and
particularly among all classes of the British nation, to lay hold of
some distinctive "American" quality, whether physiological, literary,
political, or other, and label it, and file it away, and pigeon-hole it
for reference by way of differencing "Americans" from themselves.

The notion, I venture to say, was essentially absurd. That a race of
men should materially change its physical traits in the course of two
centuries, under whatever conditions of climate or other external
influence, is inconsistent with all that we know upon that subject. The
very pyramids protest against it by their pictured records. According
to the history of mankind, as it is thus far known to us, such a change
could not take place within such a period, unless to external
influences of great modifying power there were added such an
intermingling of races as has not yet taken place here more than in
England itself, although plainly it is to come in future generations.
Up to thirty years ago the intermarriage of Yankees--by which name, for
lack of another, I designate people of English blood born in this
country--with Irish and Germans was so rare as practically, in regard
to this question, not to exist; and at that period there was not in
England itself a more purely English people than that of New England.