AMERICAN STOMACHS AS STRONG AS OF OLD.
Refutation of Statement That Our Ancestors Were Wont to Dine on Pork and Doughnuts.
One English historian began to write a history of the United States, from the adoption of the Constitution to the fall of the Republic. The battle of Gettysburg stopped him.
Professor John Mason Tyler, of Amherst, lecturing at the University of Chicago, said that climate had been the principal cause of America’s phenomenal development, and that climate ultimately would cause its degeneracy.
The Baltimore American argues against Professor Tyler, as follows:
Says the frenzied prophet: “Americans one hundred years ago lived on pork and doughnuts to a great extent. Before going to bed they were not satisfied unless they ate a large piece of mince-pie. We say to-day, ‘What a barbarous bill of fare!’ We, who can’t stand anything stronger than tea and crackers.”
In this lively sketch that, in a breath, spans a century and grasps unerringly the social and culinary philosophy of a people, the learned professor has done credit to the environment of his lecture. The doughnut philosophy here propounded is worthy to rank with the potato philosophy of an economic school that has long gone into extinction, while the dire predictions it made are embalmed in the history of intellectual errors.
The notion of a doughnut and salt pork diet, with a hunk of mince-pie as a nightcap, is a gentle evolution in social fiction. The American palate of a hundred years ago was as susceptible to the temptation of fried chicken and apple cider as it is to-day.
If the Amherst teacher could sit down to the cuisine upon which the Americans of a hundred years ago dined, he would be apt to revise his estimate of it as a “barbarous diet.” If he does not believe this, let him peruse a colonial cook-book, but with the warning that thereafter the diet of the present day will appear flaccid and unprofitable.
As to the charge that we of this age coddle our palates with tea and crackers, let the anemic professor speak for himself. The healthy American digestion tackles fearlessly canvasback duck, diamondback terrapin, and Welsh rarebit, highly condimented and in complemental relation with beverages more exhilarating, though, perhaps, less deadly, than tea, and his slumber makes no record of a wrecking of the American constitution by nightmares or disturbing physical emotions.
The breakdown of the American nation is conditional upon the collapse of the American constitution, then long after Macaulay’s solitary New Zealander seats himself on a broken span of London Bridge to view the débris of the English nation, the Stars and Stripes will still be waving over the American “constitution.”
In the meanwhile, some consolation may be derived from the fact that the American type of soldier is the finest the world affords. Darwin drew attention to the fact that the European in the American army tended to conform to the American type in stature and vigor under the influence of the American climate.