in the Anglo-Saxon stock, there has been a large Teutonic infusion
(German and Scandinavian) to counterbalance it. Simply as a matter of
observation, the differences between English and Italian manners hit you
in the eye, while the differences between American and English manners
are really microscopic; and manners, I take it, are the outward and
visible signs of temperament. A Scotchman by birth, a Londoner by habit,
I walk the streets of New York undetected, to the best of my belief,
until I begin to speak; in Rome, on the contrary, every one recognises
me at a glance as an "Inglese," unless they mistake me for an
"Americano." To me it is amazing how inessential is the change produced
by the Anglo-Saxon type and temperament by influences of climate and
admixture of foreign blood. There are great foreign cities in New
York--German, Italian, Yiddish, Bohemian, Hungarian, Chinese--but the
New York of the New Yorker is scarcely, to the Englishman, a foreign
city.

The other day I heard an Englishman, who has lived for twenty-five years
in America, maintaining very emphatically that the chief difference
between England and America lay in the greater laxity of the family bond
on this side of the Atlantic. He declared that, in the main, "home"
meant less to the American than to the Englishman, and especially that
the American boy between thirteen and twenty was habitually insurgent
against home influences. It would be ludicrous, of course, to set up the
observations of a month against the experience of a quarter of a
century; yet I cannot but feel that either I have been miraculously
fortunate in the glimpses I have obtained of American home life, or else
there is something amiss with my friend's generalisation. Perhaps he
brought away with him from England in the early seventies a conception
of the "patria potestas" which he would now find out of date there as
well as here. No doubt the migratory habit is stronger in America than