notes on America to German papers.  He says in substance that the appearance of unusual energy in America is superficial and illusory, being really due to nothing but the habits of jerkiness and bad co-ordination for which we have to thank the defective training of our people.  I think myself that it is high time for old legends and traditional opinions to be changed; and that, if any one should begin to write about Yankee inefficiency and feebleness, and inability to do anything with time except to waste it, he would have a very pretty paradoxical little thesis to sustain, with a great many facts to quote, and a great deal of experience to appeal to in its proof.

Well, my friends, if our dear American character is weakened by all this over-tension,—­and I think, whatever reserves you may make, that you will agree as to the main facts,—­where does the remedy lie?  It lies, of course, where lay the origins of the disease.  If a vicious fashion and taste are to blame for the thing, the fashion and taste must be changed.  And, though it is no small thing to inoculate seventy millions of people with new standards, yet, if there is to be any relief, that will have to be done.  We must change ourselves from a race that admires jerk and snap for their own sakes, and looks down upon low voices and quiet ways as dull, to one that, on the contrary, has calm for its ideal, and for their own sakes loves harmony, dignity, and ease.

So we go back to the psychology of imitation again.  There is only one way to improve ourselves, and that is by some of us setting an example which the others may pick up and imitate till the new fashion spreads from east to west.  Some of us are in more favorable positions than others to set new fashions.  Some are much more striking personally and imitable, so to speak.  But no living person is sunk so low as not to be imitated by somebody.  Thackeray somewhere says of the Irish nation that there never was an Irishman so poor that he didn’t have a still poorer Irishman living at his expense; and, surely, there is no human being whose example doesn’t work contagiously in some particular.  The very idiots at our public institutions imitate each other’s peculiarities.  And, if you should individually achieve calmness and harmony in your own person, you may depend upon it that a wave of imitation will spread from you, as surely as the circles spread outward when a stone is dropped into a lake.

Fortunately, we shall not have to be absolute pioneers.  Even now in New York they have formed a society for the improvement of our national vocalization, and one perceives its machinations already in the shape of various newspaper paragraphs intended to stir up dissatisfaction with the awful thing that it is.  And, better still than that, because more radical and general, is the gospel of relaxation, as one may call it, preached by Miss Annie Payson Call, of Boston, in her admirable little volume called ‘Power through Repose,’ a book that ought to be in the hands of every teacher and student in America of either sex.  You need only be followers, then, on a path already opened up by others.  But of one thing be confident:  others still will follow you.