THE NOVEL AND THE COMMON SCHOOL

By Charles Dudley Warner

There has been a great improvement in the physical condition of the
people of the United States within two generations. This is more
noticeable in the West than in the East, but it is marked everywhere; and
the foreign traveler who once detected a race deterioration, which he
attributed to a dry and stimulating atmosphere and to a feverish anxiety,
which was evident in all classes, for a rapid change of condition, finds
very little now to sustain his theory. Although the restless energy
continues, the mixed race in America has certainly changed physically for
the better. Speaking generally, the contours of face and form are more
rounded. The change is most marked in regions once noted for leanness,
angularity, and sallowness of complexion, but throughout the country the
types of physical manhood are more numerous; and if women of rare and
exceptional beauty are not more numerous, no doubt the average of
comeliness and beauty has been raised. Thus far, the increase of beauty
due to better development has not been at the expense of delicacy of
complexion and of line, as it has been in some European countries.
Physical well-being is almost entirely a matter of nutrition. Something
is due in our case to the accumulation of money, to the decrease in an
increasing number of our population of the daily anxiety about food and
clothes, to more leisure; but abundant and better-prepared food is the
direct agency in our physical change. Good food is not only more abundant
and more widely distributed than it was two generations ago, but it is to
be had in immeasurably greater variety. No other people existing, or that
ever did exist, could command such a variety of edible products for daily
consumption as the mass of the American people habitually use today. In
consequence they have the opportunity of being better nourished than any