I feel persuaded that in the matter of psychologizing, a professional is too apt to yield to the fascinations of the loftier regions of that great art, to the neglect of its lowlier walks.  Every now and then, at half-hour intervals, M. Bourget collects a hatful of airy inaccuracies and dissolves them in a panful of assorted abstractions, and runs the charge into a mould and turns you out a compact principle which will explain an American girl, or an American woman, or why new people yearn for old things, or any other impossible riddle which a person wants answered.

It seems to be conceded that there are a few human peculiarities that can be generalized and located here and there in the world and named by the name of the nation where they are found.  I wonder what they are.  Perhaps one of them is temperament.  One speaks of French vivacity and German gravity and English stubbornness.  There is no American temperament.  The nearest that one can come at it is to say there are two —­the composed Northern and the impetuous Southern; and both are found in other countries.  Morals?  Purity of women may fairly be called universal with us, but that is the case in some other countries.  We have no monopoly of it; it cannot be named American.  I think that there is but a single specialty with us, only one thing that can be called by the wide name “American.”  That is the national devotion to ice-water.  All Germans drink beer, but the British nation drinks beer, too; so neither of those peoples is the beer-drinking nation.  I suppose we do stand alone in having a drink that nobody likes but ourselves.  When we have been a month in Europe we lose our craving for it, and we finally tell the hotel folk that they needn’t provide it any more.  Yet we hardly touch our native shore again, winter or summer, before we are eager for it.  The reasons for this state of things have not been psychologized yet.  I drop the hint and say no more.

It is my belief that there are some “national” traits and things scattered about the world that are mere superstitions, frauds that have lived so long that they have the solid look of facts.  One of them is the dogma that the French are the only chaste people in the world.  Ever since I arrived in France this last time I have been accumulating doubts about that; and before I leave this sunny land again I will gather in a few random statistics and psychologize the plausibilities out of it.  If people are to come over to America and find fault with our girls and our women, and psychologize every little thing they do, and try to teach them how to behave, and how to cultivate themselves up to where one cannot tell them from the French model, I intend to find out whether those missionaries are qualified or not.  A nation ought always to examine into this detail before engaging the teacher for good.  This last one has let fall a remark which renewed those doubts of mine when I read it: