To explain them, we must go not to physical geography, but to psychology and sociology.  The latest chapter both in sociology and in psychology to be developed in a manner that approaches adequacy is the chapter on the imitative impulse.  First Bagehot, then Tarde, then Royce and Baldwin here, have shown that invention and imitation, taken together, form, one may say, the entire warp and woof of human life, in so far as it is social.  The American over-tension and jerkiness and breathlessness and intensity and agony of expression are primarily social, and only secondarily physiological, phenomena.  They are bad habits, nothing more or less, bred of custom and example, born of the imitation 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,