One acute observer has pointed out that it is the men of New York who grow haggard, wrinkled, anxious-looking, and prematurely old in their desperate efforts to provide diamonds and balls and Worth costumes and trips to Europe for their debonair, handsome, easy-going, and well-nourished spouses and daughters; while the men of Boston are "jolly dogs, who make money by legitimate trade instead of wild speculation, and show it in their countenances, illumined with the light of good cigars and champagne and other little luxuries," while their womankind are constantly worried by the New England conscience, and constantly creating anxieties for themselves where none exist. There is indeed a large amount of truth in this description, if allowance be made for pardonable exaggeration. It is among the women of Boston that one finds its traditional mantle of intellectuality worn most universally, and it is among the women of New York that one finds the most characteristic displays of love of pleasure and social triumphs. It is, perhaps, not a mere accident that the daughters of Boston's millionaires seem to marry their fellow-citizens rather than foreign noblemen. "None of _their_ money goes to gild rococo coronets."
I have a good deal of sympathy with a Canadian friend who exclaimed: "Oh, Boston! I don't include _Boston_ when I speak of the United States." Max O'Rell has similarly noted that if you wish to hear severe criticism of America you have only to go to Boston. "_Là on loue Boston et Angleterre, et l'on débine l'Amérique à dire d'experts._" It would be a mistake, however, to infer that Boston is not truly American, or that it devotes itself to any voluntary imitation of England. In a very deep sense Boston is one of the most intensely American cities in the Union; it represents, perhaps, the finest development of many of the most characteristic ideals of Americanism. Its resemblances to England seem to be due to the simple fact that like causes produce like results. The original English stock by which Boston was founded has remained less mixed here than, perhaps, in any other city of America; and the differences between the descendants of the Puritans who emigrated and the descendants of those of them who remained at home are not complicated by a material infusion of alien blood in either case. The independence of the original settlers, their hatred of coercion and tyranny, have naturally grown with two centuries and a half of democracy; even the municipal administration has not been wholly captured by the Irish voter. The Bostonian has, to a very appreciable extent, solved the problem of combining the virtues of democracy with the manners of aristocracy; and I know not where you will find a better type of the American than the Boston gentleman: patriotic with enlightened patriotism; finely mannered even to the class immediately below his own; energetic, but not a slave to the pursuit of wealth; liberal in his religion, but with something of the Puritan conscience still lying _perdu_ beneath his universalism; distributing his leisure between art, literature, and outdoor occupations; a little cool in his initial manner to strangers, but warmly hospitable when his confidence in your merit is satisfied. We, in England, may well feel proud that the blood which flows in the veins of the ideal Bostonian is as distinctly and as truly English as that of our own Gladstones and Morleys, our Brownings and our Tennysons.