The abounding gentleman from Idaho, or Cincinnati, or Nahant, will tell you that the American woman is a dream of beauty and goodness. If I am to credit the American he would not take eighty thousand dollars for her—no, sir! At least, he doesn’t calculate that he would. The American woman, sir, is a peach. The American man believes in her down to the soles of his store boots, and has been educated to regard her as a being of angelic antecedents and destiny. Far be it from a simple scribbler to pluck from her, unless it were by way of a memento, one single angel feather. But at time and time I have seen a considerable deal of her, and I shall venture to put her down here as she seems to me, who am no judge and do not matter anyway. In the first place I shall assert, though it were at the risk of my life, that the American woman is not always beautiful, and that even the beautiful American woman is not always beautiful. I shall go further and say that for one beautiful woman per thousand head of the population in America we can produce at least three in England and four or five in Ireland. Furthermore, the English or the Irish beauty will last you three times as long as the American variety, and in point of fact it seldom really wanes, whereas, in America, feminine beauty nearly always passes, and passes quickly. It should be clearly understood—and I say it with my hand on my heart—that this is not the fault of the American woman, with whom I have no quarrel, and upon whom I desire to pass no aspersion. The vulgar commentators on the American woman’s physical blemishes and shortcomings have assured us that they are the direct result of her diet, which is said to consist of pea-nuts, griddle cakes, oysters, pie, turkey, stewed terrapin, tinned mushrooms, fat ham, cheese, chocolates, and ice cream. As is usually the case, however, the vulgar commentators are entirely wrong. The real enemy of the American woman’s beauty is the American climate. In the process of time it is climate that makes and mars everything. It is climate that has made the African black and the European white. It is climate that is rapidly transforming the American man into a sort of ignoble red man or Kickapoo Indian, and it is climate that may eventually make the American woman resemble a squaw. The American climate produced the American Indian. The American climate is modifying the physique of the American man and marring and obliterating the great and undeniable beauty of the American woman.