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 the _sera
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 husbands and 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 the _blasé_. 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