does not involve the doer in loss. There is less _gratuitous_
insolence. Servility, with its attendant hypocrisy and deceit, is
conspicuously absent; and the general spirit of independence, if
sometimes needlessly boorish in its manifestations, is at least sturdy
and manly. In England we are rude to those weaker than ourselves; in
America the rudeness is apt to be directed against those whom we
suspect to be in some way our superior. Man is regarded by man rather
as an object of interest than as an object of suspicion. Charity is
very widespread; and the idea of a fellow-creature actually suffering
from want of food or shelter is, perhaps, more repugnant to the
average American than to the average Englishman, and more apt to act
immediately on his purse-strings. In that which popular language
usually means when it speaks of immorality, all outward indications
point to the greater purity of the American. The conversation of the
smoking-room is a little less apt to be _risqué_; the possibility of
masculine continence is more often taken for granted; solicitation on
the streets is rare; few American publishers of repute dare to issue
the semi-prurient style of novel at present so rife in England; the
columns of the leading magazines are almost prudishly closed to
anything suggesting the improper. The tone of the stage is distinctly
healthier, and adaptations of hectic French plays are by no means so
popular, in spite of the general sympathy of American taste with
French. The statistics of illegitimacy point in the same direction,
though I admit that this is not necessarily a sign of unsophisticated
morality. In a word, when an Englishman goes to France he feels that
the moral tone in this respect is more lax than in England; when he
goes to America he feels that it is more firm. And he will hardly find
adequate the French explanation, _viz._, that there is not less vice
but more hypocrisy in the Anglo-Saxon community.