But it has another limitation of equal importance which may be described as climatic; for this malady is not found in equal degrees all over the habitable globe. There are many lands where it hardly exists at all even among the class which is alone liable to it; and in its serious form it is found only over a small part of the earth. There are many causes which conduce to this partial distribution. In one country manners are not minutely schooled, women being held of secondary account, and men content without subtlety; in another, life is in itself too primitive to devise the artifices of refinement; in a third, the fundamental disunion between the mind and the physical organism is prevented by the kindly hand of nature. For these reasons all the savage world, all the East, and the whole of southern Europe have little knowledge of the diffident, and what zoologists would call the area of distribution of the species is confined within narrow geographical limits. It is in fact chiefly in the north and west of our own continent that the haunts of the diffident are to be found, for there alone are all the conditions necessary to their maintenance fulfilled--a society sufficiently leisured and wealthy to have elaborated conventional rules of intercourse, the assemblage of both sexes upon an equal footing, and a climate which exaggerates the antagonism between the quick mind and the unresponsive body. Here the cold humid airs have produced a race with great limbs and great appetites, but compensated these gifts by a certain unreadiness in the delicate encounter of wits and graces. To these impassive natures all displays of the personality are distasteful, and the lighter social arts, seeming both insignificant and histrionic, are learned with difficulty and practised with repugnance. An awkwardness of address, in the uneducated almost bovine, becomes in the cultivated a painful reserve and self-consciousness, reflecting in open physical distress the uneasiness of the man's whole being. And among the northern nations which are thus afflicted England has achieved an undesirable supremacy, having herself smoothed the path of her eminence by a school system which withdraws her youth from female influences during the years when the tendency to reserve may be combated with a certain hope of success. It would ill become one who has never recovered from the effects of such deprivation to assume on the ground of his own narrow experience any wide dissemination of similar defects among his countrymen; his testimony would be received with suspicion, and he would be condemned as one who to justify himself would drag others down to his own poor level. Let me therefore place myself on surer ground by calling as a witness an impartial observer from another country, one exceptionally trained in the analysis of national temperament and conduct.