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ENGLAND AND AMERICA.

When I was giving, in Dundee, a lecture upon the Education of Women in
America, the substance of which appeared in the _Westminster Review_ of
October, 1873, the chairman, on introducing me, said, "De Tocqueville,
the French philosopher, considered that the chief cause of the great
prosperity of the American nation is the superiority of the women; now
we are to hear to-night how these women are produced."

Two things uniformly strike foreign travellers in our country; the
general intelligence of the people, and the equality of the education
and intellectual interests of the men and the women; and few remarks are
oftener heard from those who have visited us, or have known our
countrymen and women on the Continent than this: "American women seem so
much superior to the men."

But a third fact stands just as boldly forth--the thin,
unhealthy-looking physique and nervous sensibility of the American
people; and the impression of this is deepened by comparing us with our
original ancestors, the English, confessedly the finest physical race in
the world. These facts--the superior average education in America, and
the inferior average physique of the nation--are so striking, that it
is strange that they have not oftener and more forcibly been placed
together as cause and effect. The education has gone on increasing, and
the physique has gone on declining, till now the census returns begin to
make us look anxiously about us. Our men are unmuscular and short-lived,
the best of them; the men of a physique of the type of Chief Justice
Chase rarely live beyond sixty or sixty-five. They are not invalids, but
they are subject to fever, congestion, and paralysis, violent crises.
The women are slight, graceful, impressionable, and active. In the
poorer ranks of life they have a nervous, anxious look; in the
well-to-do and wealthier ranks, a nervous, spiritual look. They are not
invalids, but they are delicate, and are kept under a constant and
chafing restraint from want of strength to carry out the plans they set
before them, and they give an unsatisfactory prospect for the coming
generations. Our census reports are very trustworthy oracles; these give
us dark omens, and it is folly to shut our eyes.

Many causes may be assigned as contributing to this physical
deterioration, any one of which, with a little ingenuity, may be clearly
made to appear responsible for almost the whole; and such, in some
degr