I believe this to be true. People in New York, and in America in general, are not afraid of new ideas, nor, indeed, of anything new. They are not afraid of the future. In England, if a man finds, for instance, that his profession is uncongenial to him, however certain he may be of the impossibility of his making a success of it, he will none the less very rarely give it up and try his hand at something else. The future alarms him. In America a man will think nothing of throwing up his profession twenty times running, until he finds something which does suit him. I think the cause of this particular difference lies in the climate of America, and especially in the climate of New York. Just as the climate of some places fills the whole system with an invincible desire to do nothing, with an insuperable languor and sloth, in the same way the climate of New York fills the body and mind with the desire to be up and about. It is the nimble air which produces the nimble wits: the stimulating atmosphere which creates, in the denizen of New York, the love of bustle, hurry, competition, and work. I am not saying this is either a good thing or a bad thing--I am merely noting and recording what struck me as being the main differences between New York and London. London, compared with certain cities, say Constantinople or Seville, seems a whirlpool of energy; compared with New York, it is slack. Compared with New Yorkers, Londoners are slackers. They go to bed earlier, they get up later, they do infinitely less during the day, and they do it more slowly. They waste more time. On the other hand, they suffer less from “nerve trouble.” They do not live on their nerves. In New York the people do. Very often, when you talk to some one who is employed, say in a store, in New York, you feel as if he was so highly strung as to be on the verge of breaking down; another turn of the screw and you feel he would break down. You never feel this in talking to a Londoner. In talking to a Londoner, you often want to give him a dose of H. G. Wells’s “accelerator,” the medicine which makes you live more quickly. In talking to a New Yorker, you often think he would be the better for a dose of some patent procrastinator, which would have the effect of making the wheels of his physical and mental machinery work slower. A street boy, a child, in New York, is more nimble-minded, more agile in thought and expression, than the quickest-witted Englishman. He will have got there and be walking round him in thought before the Englishman has begun to express himself. I was much struck by the patience and tolerance shown to me by lift-boys and other children in dealing with some one so much heavier-witted and sluggish-minded than themselves, especially when one began cumbrously to explain something they had already understood some minutes before.