The Englishman is taken advisedly, because he represents four-fifths of the population of the British Isles. And first let it be said that there is no more unconsciously deceptive person on the face of the globe. The Englishman does not know himself; outside England he is but guessed at. Racially the Englishman is so complex and so old a blend that no one can say what he is. In character he is just as complex. Physically, there are two main types: one inclining to length of limb, narrowness of face and head (you will see nowhere such long and narrow heads as in our islands), and bony jaws; the other approximating more to the ordinary “John Bull.” The first type is gaining on the second. There is little or no difference in the main character behind. In attempting to understand the real nature of the Englishman, certain salient facts must be borne in mind. THE SEA.—To be surrounded generation after generation by the sea has developed in him a suppressed idealism, a peculiar impermeability, a turn for adventure, a faculty for wandering, and for being sufficient unto himself in far and awkward surroundings. THE CLIMATE.—Whoso weathers for centuries a climate that, though healthy and never extreme, is, perhaps, the least reliable and one of the wettest in the world, must needs grow in himself a counter-balance of dry philosophy, a defiant humour, an enforced medium temperature of soul. The Englishman is no more given to extremes than is his climate; against its damp and perpetual changes he has become coated with a sort of bluntness. THE POLITICAL AGE OF HIS COUNTRY.—This is by far the oldest settled Western Power, politically speaking. For eight hundred and fifty years England has known no serious military disturbance from without; for nearly two hundred she has known no serious political turmoil within. This is partly the outcome of her isolation, partly the happy accident of her political constitution, partly the result of the Englishman’s habit of looking before he leaps, which comes, no doubt, from the climate and the mixture of his blood. This political stability has been a tremendous factor in the formation of English character, has given the Englishman of all ranks a certain deep slow sense of form and order, an engrained culture—if one may pirate the word—that makes no show, being in the bones of the man, as it were. The Great Preponderance for Several Generations of Town over Country Life.—Taken in conjunction with centuries of political stability, this is the main cause of a growing inarticulate humaneness, of which—speaking generally—the Englishman appears to be rather ashamed.