That I am not alone in my pondering over this American question mark is indicated by another letter, lately received, from a man with a very different type of mind from the correspondents just noted. “A six weeks’ lecture tour,” he writes, “including Texas, California, and Colorado, brings me back to New York with the major impression that all America is asking questions. Healthy mental curiosity is not a thing to be condemned in children, but it is a healthier sign in adults when they occasionally take the trouble to think out the answers for themselves. My limited experience in France has convinced me that the average Frenchman is ashamed to ask a question without volunteering at least part of the answer. In England questions are apt to be either rhetorical or veiled in the form of statements open to correction. I am told the problem is the decay of conversation[Pg 223] in America but I doubt whether we ever had any conversations to decay. Sophisticated New York is no exception.” Questions and converse are closely linked but it is easier in our social history to trace the continuance of the former than of the latter. We have, indeed, an occasional comment, such as that of John Adams who noted in his Diary when passing through New York in 1774 on his way to the Continental Congress that in spite “of all the opulence and splendor of this city, there is very little good breeding to be found” and “no conversation that is agreeable; there is no modesty, no attention to one another. They talk very loud, very fast, and all together.” Alexander Hamilton, not the celebrated statesman but a Baltimore doctor, is the only man I know who tried to report colonial conversations verbatim, as may be found in his little-known but immensely entertaining Itinerarium. With almost complete unanimity, however, all travelers for a couple of centuries comment on the, to them, curious American habit of asking questions in every part of the country. It begins as early as 1710, perhaps earlier, and becomes marked as the travel literature rapidly increases after the French and Indian War. It is a habit, therefore, which obviously has a long history behind it and for which the first explanation sought must be an historical one. The frontier, that omnipresent though often unrecognized influence in so many departments of American life, is probably at the bottom of it. In a sparsely settled section there are two good reasons for putting a stranger through his catechism,—danger and paucity of intellectual interest. Even today, in the remoter parts of the Carolina mountains,[Pg 224] to quote a bit of personal experience, the opening of conversation is still stereotyped when a mountaineer meets a stranger on the road. “Howdy.” Then, with no show of diffidence, “what mought your name be?”, and when this has been satisfactorily answered, comes inevitably next, “whar mought you be goin’?”.