I believe the answer is definitely yes.
A quick google search turned up this book result, "The History of the English paragraph," by Edwin Herbert Lewis, where it says:
In view of the now well known fact(1) that the English sentence has decreased in average length at least one half in three hundred years the question arises whether the length of the paragraph has decreased increased or remained stationary.
The citation is:
(1) The fact was definitely demonstrated by Professor L. A. Sherman, in his Analytics of Literature, Boston, 1892.
Another google search turned up the book, and I found a certain Chapter XIX titled "The Literary Sentence-Length In English Prose."
On page 259 he supplies some hard data from various book sources, which I've converted to text here and filled in with full names, book titles, and dates. This shows the average number of words in between periods for the first few hundred periods:
Robert Fabyan, "Chronicle", written 1516-1559
First hundred periods: 68.28
Second " " : 66.68
Third " " : 56.12
Fourth " " : 65.77
Fifth " " : 58.26
Average: 63.02
Edmund Spenser, "A View of the Present State of Ireland", written 1590s
First hundred periods: 49.78
Second " " : 50.24
Third " " : 53.67
Fourth " " : 47.56
Fifth " " : 47.88
Average: 49.83
Richard Hooker, "Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie", written 1594-1597
First hundred periods: 43.98
Second " " : 40.90
Third " " : 37.12
Fourth " " : 41.63
Fifth " " : 43.40
Average: 41.41
Thomas Babington Macaulay, "Essay on History", written 1828
First hundred periods: 23.23
Second " " : 21.26
Third " " : 25.95
Fourth " " : 22.20
Fifth " " : 19.65
Average: 22.46
William Ellery Channing, "Self-Culture", written 1838
First hundred periods: 25.15
Second " " : 25.51
Third " " : 25.38
Fourth " " : 26.80
Fifth " " : 25.84
Average: 25.74
Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Address before the Senior Class in Divinity College", written 1838
First hundred periods: 18.06
Second " " : 20.15
Third " " : 21.01
Fourth " " : 24.18
Fifth " " : 19.52
Average: 20.58
The time periods are: Fabyan (? - 1513), Spenser (1552-1599), Hooker (1554-1600), Macaulay (source written in 1828), Channing (source written in 1838), and Emerson (1803-1882). To round it off, by my own reckoning, the preface to Sherman's book (1892) has an average of 24.77 words for its 168 sentences. There seems to be a gap of sources in the 1700s, so I wonder if those sentences were around 30-40 words long on average.
He goes on to show that the authors are pretty consistent within their own works, so these numbers are pretty indicative of an author's style. Furthermore, Sherman demonstrates that the number of predicates per sentence has also decreased with time. Unfortunately he does not claim to know the cause of this.
Right - American English favors "toward," and UK standard tends to add an 's.'
This also applies to "forward," "backward," etc. These are explained in more detail by Fowler, Merriam-Websters Dictionary of English Usage, et al.
Best Answer
Since the words toward and towards—as used today in the sense of "in the direction of"—are identical and interchangeable, the choice of which one to use is strictly a style question.
The first U.S. discussion of toward versus towards that I'm aware of appears in Joseph Hull, English Grammar, by Lectures: Comprehending the Principles and Rules of Syntactical Parsing, on a New and Highly Approved System, seventh edition (1833):
Unfortunately for a modern reader, it isn't clear whether the italicized words are the "barbarous words of uncouth sound" or "those of the same import more pleasing to the ear." On balance I suspect that Hull considered the versions marred by an extra x or s to be of uncouth sound, but if he meant to condemn towards, he was doing so without the backing of Noah Webster's An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828) which treated toward and towards as interchangeable with regard to the senses "in the direction of," "regarding," "tending to," and "near."
Perhaps the most significant development in the U.S. rivalry between toward and towards involves the treatment of the two words in the 1847 edition of Webster's An American Dictionary of the English Language: Without any explanation, towards simply vanishes. And when it reappears in the 1864 edition of that dictionary, it does so only in the form of a one line entry reading "Towards. Same as TOWARD." Coequal treatment of the two forms doesn't resume until the arrival of the first Webster's International Dictionary (1890).
In any event, the next commenter on toward and towards, Alfred Ayres, The Verbalist (1896) is less ambiguous about his contemporaries' preferences:
U.S. reference works from the past 70 years or so are remarkably consistent in anointing toward as the preferred U.S. spelling, but not one of them analyzes the change in U.S. usage that brought this state of affairs about. From Bergen Evans & Cornelia Evans, A Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage (1957):
From Theodore Bernstein, The Careful Writer (1973):
From Roy Copperud, American Usage and Style: The Consensus (1980):
From The Associated Press Stylebook and Libel Manual (1980):
From Webster's Dictionary of English Usage (1989):
From Kenneth Wilson, The Columbia Guide to Standard American English (1993):
From Allan Siegal & William Connolly, The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage (1999):
And from Bryan Garner, Garner's Modern American Usage (2003):
In the book's entry for "DIRECTIONAL WORDS," Garner makes these comments:
So there you have it—decades of observing that toward is more prevalent than towards in the United States, but no explanation of why.
In my years of work as a freelance and in-house copy editor, I've noticed that U.S. publishers commonly specify the use of toward, just as AP and The New York Times do. Old-fashioned publishers like the idea that all of the books they publish follow a consistent house style—and that, of course, makes an arbitrary style preference self-perpetuating. As publishing moves away from enforcing house styles and toward a "we can't afford to worry about that kind of stuff" model, I think you'll see an increase in the frequency of towards in U.S. publications, since the preference for toward was never as strong at the manuscript stage as it was on bookstore shelves.