or his despair; from his innermost self comes the hymn of victory or the cry of desolation. And the poets sing and the people hearken when there are great deeds to be done or great wrongs to be redressed, when men are to be inspired to resist or to defend themselves. War and poverty, the material — there is the inspiration of the poets.

It is something more than a theory that has here been advanced. It rests on the facts of history. The great art and literature of Greece and Rome were given to the world at a time when their splendor was unrivaled, when their riches were beyond compare, when with great wealth there was poverty equally as great. Ferrero calls our attention to the same phenomenon in Egypt. At the time when her agriculture was prosperous, her manufactures flourishing, her commerce widely spread, her schools famous, then also "her artistic life was vigorous." The artisans of Alexandria manufactured the most delicate fabrics, perfumes, glassware, papyrus, and numerous other articles of art and luxury which were ever sold in the markets of the world. Egypt was the home of luxury and elegance, and her painters and her decorators went everywhere, even to Italy; while to Egypt, then a centre of learning, from all parts of the world, even from Greece, students came to study in the schools of medicine and astronomy and literature at Alexandria.1

The great intellectual movement in England came 1 Ferrero: The Greatness and Decline of Rome, vol. iii, pp. 240–241.

at a time when she was rich as she had never been before. The Elizabethan age was an age of intense material prosperity, when wealth was being rapidly accumulated, when commerce possessed the whole people, when the spirit of adventure had seized them, and yet it presented the same contrast that has always been witnessed at this stage of national development. On the one hand there was great luxury and great wealth, on the other there was great suffering and great poverty, and the condition of the poor was deplorable. The imagination is fired by the deeds of Raleigh and his captains; by that brave battle in the Channel; we stand with uncovered head before the tomb of Shakespeare; the great statesmen and philosophers have left their imperishable record; but let not our emotions nor our admiration blind us to the direful fact that it was in the reign of Elizabeth that the first poor-law was placed on the statute-books. In a subsequent chapter I shall more at length discuss the causes that have produced as well as arrested American art.

I have laid down the proposition that the civilization of America is not that of England; that the American people are no longer English, but a new race. I shall now endeavor to show how it came about that the civilization of England was checked in America and ran in new channels, the causes that have produced a new race, and the conclusions to be drawn from the facts established.

CHAPTER III

THE INFLUENCE OF ENVIRONMENT ON RACE

IN tracing the development of American civilization, the growth of the American race, and the formation of national characteristics, we are impressed with the fact that the history of the American people properly divides itself into four grand divisions, each epochal in character-building. It is unnecessary to resort to empirical or arbitrary methods to ascertain where the dividing lines fall. They are the strata of human formation. These four epochs are:

1. Colonial Days - the period from the arrival of the first settlers at Jamestown and the establishment of the Plymouth Colony until the American nation was born in the throes of the revolt against oppression.

2. Independence - the period that saw the birth of a new political and moral creed.

3. The Civil War - the period that was the formative stage in the American character; that began in war in defense of justice and closed in war in defense of human liberty and political solidarity. 4. The Spanish War the period from the close of the Civil War to the present; that hardened the mould of the American character and opened the vista to the future.

Observe, as throwing a vivid light on the causes that have produced the mental and moral characteristics of the American people, that each of these epochs was born in the passion of war, at each successive stage of American progress the heavens were riven with the storm of conflict, and the daughters of Jupiter came forth.

"Can tyrants but by tyrants conquered be,

And freedom find no champion and no child,
Such as Columbia saw arise, when she

Sprang forth a Pallas, armed and undefiled?"

The beginning of America was a resistance against religious oppression and a revolt against the suppression of personal liberty; and rebellion unless quickly checked leads to war, and it led, in this case, as was inevitable, to war to preserve liberty and to perpetuate an ideal. Each period was unconsciously but inexorably the preparation and precursor of that which followed, and each in passing wrought with iron hand in American development. Perhaps in all the history of all the world we shall find nothing so remarkable as this — race development that can be directly traced to the effects of war. But observe again, because it is one of those antinomies with which the history of the American people abounds, that while war has more profoundly affected their character than that of any other modern race, for the first one hundred and fifty years succeeding their birth they fought no war in defense of religious

freedom or in the name of religion, they were not passed over like chattels from one sovereign to another, they knew no flag but their own, they engaged in no war of conquest solely to bring an alien people under their domination. While all Europe was involved in that great Thirty Years' struggle; while the history of Europe for a century and a half following the English settlement of America is a continuous record of war; while wars of the Spanish Succession, of the Polish Succession, of the Austrian Succession, even of Jenkins's Ear, burden the pages of history and make one weary to discover what it was all about and why it was worth fighting for; while Europe was one vast armed camp drenched in blood and the breedingground for the sordid ambitions of kings and statesmen, America, far removed from the scene of conflict, went forward in her spiritual and material development. We shall see later how profoundly American political institutions and American psychology were influenced by the conflict with the French and Indians, but the consequences were entirely different from those resulting from the wars of Europe, which made every man a soldier, who when he was not fighting under his sovereign's banner as his liegeman or as his mercenary became a rebel against the kingly power. The border warfare kept the colonist alert to defend his foothold in the New World, but his aim was security, his ambition the unmolested homestead right.