THE RESTLESS AMERICAN

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXII, Issue LXII, 30 January 1912, Page 2

THE RESTLESS AMERICAN

I cannot find that quickness is an American characteristic. What "is mistaken for quickness is a 'kind of nervous fidgets, for the American is infinitely restless and nervous. ' It is shown in his passion for doing many things at once. The bearber shop, a thing characteristically American, affords a wonderful example of this substitution of restless-^ ness and circumstance for real rapidity and economy of. time. The business man, sfcill in his dramatic character of a locomotive pressed for time, hurries into the barber shop and extends himself in a chair, feet and hands outspread;, a bootblack engaged on each foot, a manicurist on each" hand. But such are the seductions of the barber shop that he probably spends 20 minutes or half an hour there, as against the Englishman's four or five minutes. It is time simply wasted from a business point of, view; that is to say, it is spent in- sheer luxury.. For the Americans, being among the cleanest people in the world, have a Roman sense of luxury in everything that appertains -to washing and care of the body; and their lavatories and barber shops are like temples raised to some goddess of health and cleanliness. And, finally, it was America that invented that triumph in the achievement of two opposite things at once —the rocking-chair. So restless and nervous is the American that even when he is resting he wants to be moving; and consequently he has achieved this infernal engine, the rocking-chair, in which (when he is obliged to remain in one place for a time) he can indulge in a continuous movement which yet does not advance him an inch." He can thus be busy even while he is at ,rest. —Mr Filson Young in the English Review.