n of bad
models and the cultivation of false personal ideals. How are idioms
acquired, how do local peculiarities of phrase and accent come about?
Through an accidental example set by some one, which struck the ears of
others, and was quoted and copied till at last every one in the locality
chimed in. Just so it is with national tricks of vocalization or
intonation, with national manners, fashions of movement and gesture, and
habitual expressions of face. We, here in America, through following a
succession of pattern-setters whom it is now impossible to trace, and
through influencing each other in a bad direction, have at last settled
down collectively into what, for better or worse, is our own
characteristic national type,--a type with the production of which, so
far as these habits go, the climate and conditions have had practically
nothing at all to do.

This type, which we have thus reached by our imitativeness, we now have
fixed upon us, for better or worse. Now no type can be _wholly_
disadvantageous; but, so far as our type follows the bottled-lightning
fashion, it cannot be wholly good. Dr. Clouston was certainly right in
thinking that eagerness, breathlessness, and anxiety are not signs of
strength: they are signs of weakness and of bad co-ordination. The even
forehead, the slab-like cheek, the codfish eye, may be less interesting
for the moment; but they are more promising signs than intense
expression is of what we may expect of their possessor in the long run.
Your dull, unhurried worker gets over a great deal of ground, because he
never goes backward or breaks down. Your intense, convulsive worker
breaks down and has bad moods so often that you never know where he may
be when you most need his help,--he may be having one of his 'bad days.'
We say that so many of our fellow-countrymen collapse, and have to be
sent abroad to rest their nerves, because they work so hard. I suspect
that this is an immense mistake. I suspect that neither the nature nor
the amount of our work is accountable for the frequency and severity of
our breakdowns, but that their cause lies rather in those absurd
feelings of hurry and having no time, in that breathlessness and
tension, that anxiety of feature and that solicitude for results, that
lack of inner harmony and ease, in short, by which with us the work is
so apt to be accompanied, and from which a European who should do the
same work would nine times out of ten be free. These p