And now let me go a step deeper into mental hygiene, and try to enlist your insight and sympathy in a cause which I believe is one of paramount patriotic importance to us Yankees.  Many years ago a Scottish medical man, Dr. Clouston, a mad-doctor as they call him there, or what we should call an asylum physician (the most eminent one in Scotland), visited this country, and said something that has remained in my memory ever since.  “You Americans,” he said, “wear too much expression on your faces.  You are living like an army with all its reserves engaged in action.  The duller countenances of the British population betoken a better scheme of life.  They suggest stores of reserved nervous force to fall back upon, if any occasion should arise that requires it.  This inexcitability, this presence at all times of power not used, I regard,” continued Dr. Clouston, “as the great safeguard of our British people.  The other thing in you gives me a sense of insecurity, and you ought somehow to tone yourselves down.  You really do carry too much expression, you take too intensely the trivial moments of life.”

Now Dr. Clouston is a trained reader of the secrets of the soul as expressed upon the countenance, and the observation of his which I quote seems to me to mean a great deal.  And all Americans who stay in Europe long enough to get accustomed to the spirit, that reigns and expresses itself there, so unexcitable as compared with ours, make a similar observation when they return to their native shores.  They find a wild-eyed look upon their compatriots’ faces, either of too desperate eagerness and anxiety or of too intense responsiveness and good-will.  It is hard to say whether the men or the women show it most.  It is true that we do not all feel about it as Dr. Clouston felt.  Many of us, far from deploring it, admire it.  We say:  “What intelligence it shows!  How different from the stolid cheeks, the codfish eyes, the slow, inanimate demeanor we have been seeing in the British Isles!” Intensity, rapidity, vivacity of appearance, are indeed with us something of a nationally accepted ideal; and the medical notion of “irritable weakness” is not the first thing suggested by them to our mind, as it was to Dr. Clouston’s.  In a weekly paper not very long ago I remember reading a story in which, after describing the beauty and interest of the heroine’s personality, the author summed up her charms by saying that to all who looked upon her an impression as of “bottled lightning” was irresistibly conveyed.

Bottled lightning, in truth, is one of our American ideals, even of a, young girl’s character!  Now it is most ungracious, and it may seem to some persons unpatriotic, to criticise in public the physical peculiarities of one’s own people, of one’s own family, so to speak.  Besides, it may be said, and said with justice, that there are plenty of bottled-lightning temperaments in other countries, and plenty of phlegmatic temperaments here; and that, when all is said and done,