The American is insulted if mention of dowry is made in his wedding arrangements. He marries because he loves the woman and she him. Hence, the American people have become exceedingly beautiful. Then the facilities for divorce presented in the United States are an important factor in the beautification process. Love is really at the bottom of it all—not money-bags or race, but love.
The French are always talking about l'amour, l'amour; but really there is no amour there at all—people generally talk most about what they haven't got or don't know. Yes, indeed, so rare is l'amour in France that it accounts for the decline in facial beauty of the French woman—not in movement, for in movement she excels the world, but in face. Rome and Greece were ruined by treating marriage as a matter of business.
Complementary to Dr. Reich's praise of the American woman's beauty is his criticism of her love of domination. In that characteristic he reads the doom of America. We quote his reasons from the New York American:
Nations differ in nothing so much as in their women. The French, English, or American woman is easily distinguishable. The American woman is totally different from the English woman. So is the French woman, though the difference in this case is not so intense; so is the German woman; so is the woman of Italy. The American woman, while differing from all her European sisters of to-day, bears a marked resemblance to the woman of ancient Sparta. The Spartans resembled the present-day Americans; the Athenians were like the English.
I do not blame, I do not praise; I only say, and I say emphatically, that the American woman is not womanly; she is not a woman. The whole of the United States is under petticoat government, and man is practically non-existent.
In America, woman commands man. Man does not count there. The last man that came to America was Christopher Columbus. To-day, man has no existence; he does not talk in the drawing-room, but is a dummy. The woman lives one life, the man another, and they are totally distinct from each other.
The Best Complexion in the World.
She is as new as a man born to-day is new; she is made up of restlessness and fidgetiness long before she is twenty-five. But she is very beautiful; she has the best complexion in the world—better than that of any European woman. She is also well built and handsome. You see fine specimens of the American woman in Kentucky and Massachusetts.
A few miles distant from the Athens of old—what would be but a short railway journey in these days—lay Sparta. The Spartans were imperialists, and they wanted to conquer the whole of Greece. The Spartan woman, as I have remarked, was like the American woman of to-day. She never dreamed of lovers; her idea was nothing less than conquering man; she never thought of him as more than a fellow athlete.