e, a widespread impression in England that American
women as a rule are not womanly. The average American girl acquires when
young a self-possession and an ability to converse in company which
Englishwomen only, and then not always, acquire much later in life.
Therefore the American girl appears, to English eyes, to be "forward,"
and she is assumed to possess all the vices which go with "forwardness"
in an English maiden. Which is entirely unjust. Let us remember that
there is hardly a girl growing up in England to-day who would not have
been considered forward and ill-mannered to an almost intolerable degree
by her great-grandmother. But that the girls of to-day are any the less
womanly, in all that is sweet and essential in womanliness, than any
generation of their ancestors, I for one do not believe. Nor do I
believe that in another generation, when they will perhaps, as a matter
of course, possess all the social precocity (as it seems to us) of the
American girl of to-day, they will thereby be any the less true and
tender women than their mothers.

In particular, are American girls supposed to be so commercially
case-hardened that their artistic sensibilities have been destroyed. A
notorious American "revivalist" some years ago returned from a
much-advertised trip to England and told his American congregations of
the sinfulness which he had seen in the Old World. Among other things he
had seen, so he said, more tipsy men and women in the streets of London
in (I think) a month than he had seen in the streets of his native town
of Topeka, Kansas, in some--no matter what--large number of years. Very
possibly he was right. But he omitted to say that he had also seen
several million more sober ones. A population of 6,000,000 frequently
contains more drunkards than one of 30,000. It also contains more
metaphysicians. On the same principle it is entirely likely that the
American girl, who talks so much, says many more foolish things than the
English one who, if she can help it, never talks at all. The American
girl is only a girl after all, and because she has acquired a
conversational fluency which the Englishwoman will only arrive at twenty
years later, it is not just to suppose that she must also have acquired
an additional twenty years' maturity of mind.

Most English readers are familiar with the picture of the American girl
who flits through Europe seeing nothing in the Parthenon or in Whitehall
beyond an inferiorit