such an odious name, it was their teachings and their influence that made theoretic Democracy a reality. This is the debt not only of America but of the world to the Puritan. If American civilization and American development are to be understood, it is necessary that the character and the achievements of the Puritan must be minutely studied to explain the motivating causes of American psychology. "an I must plead guilty to having employed the term English" when "British" would perhaps have been more comprehensive. It has been a labor of love and a matter of pride with some American authors to credit to the branches of what we now know as the people of the United Kingdom a particular influence in the formation of American character. Thus Fiske considers the migration of the Ulster Protestants in the seventeenth century, generally spoken of in America as the "Scotch-Irish, event of scarcely less importance than the exodus of English Puritans to New England and that of English Cavaliers to Virginia"; and Roosevelt says, "The West was won by those who have been rightly called the Roundheads of the South, the same men who, before any others, declared for American independence." There is a library of very fair proportions on the Scotch and Irish in America and the influence they have had on American development. Englishmen use the adjectives Eng 992 1 1 Fiske: Old Virginia and Her Neighbours, vol. II, p. 390. lish and British interchangeably as meaning a person born in the United Kingdom to distinguish subjects of the Crown born in Canada, Australia, or other parts of the Empire, and not to mark that fine distinction between Englishmen, Irishmen, and Scotchmen that is so carefully made in the United States. In the English rather than the American sense I have used "English" when referring to English influence on American institutions and the formation of American character, because it is almost impossible, in some instances, to resolve the Scotch and Irish into their original elements and eliminate the Saxon strain from the Celtic. Thus, one has often heard in America that a certain American is not of English but "Scotch-Irish' descent; 1 but the so-called Scotch-Irish were never Irish except as they became Irish from living in Ireland. The men and women who were brought over to Ireland by the first Stuart King and settled on the forfeited estates of the Earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnel in the Province of Ulster, in the opening years of the seventeenth century, were Scotch and English Protestants, the Scotch predominating, and not Irish; and they became "Scotch-Irish" by habitation and environment. It was these ScotchIrish, in whose veins ran so much English blood, who left Ulster in large numbers in the beginning of the eighteenth century, and settled in Pennsyl 1 1 This term "Scotch-Irish" is seldom if ever used by Englishmen in England, and seems to be peculiarly a term of American coinage. vania, thence to spread south through Virginia and the Carolinas, and from the South followed the western trail to the Pacific. I use the term English to differentiate the men of the English-speaking race trained under English institutions and those of Teutonic and Latin descent; and not to magnify the English at the expense of the Scotch or the Irish. Without the slightest desire to detract from Irish or Scotch achievement, it has been my endeavor to make clear the distinction between the Englishspeaking race and the non-English-speaking races of the European Continent. Some objection has been raised to my statement that the Americans are a "new" race and not a mongrel race, and I have been told that ethnology knows no such thing as a "pure" race, and that the Americans are no more an unmixed strain than are the English, the Germans, or the Latins. I do not think I have written anything in the previous volume that can be fairly interpreted as my belief in the purity of blood. There I wrote,1 in I believe not ambiguous language: "There is to-day no unmixed race. The theory of the unvitiated strain, both in man and animals, is now known to be a fallacy. The great races are races of mixed blood and cross-breeding." I have simply tried to show that the Americans as the results of environment, political and social institutions, and their own philosophy are not diluted Englishmen any more 1 See page 56. than they are imitation Germans, or transplanted Spaniards, but that they are new in the sense that they have evolved a distinct American type, with mental and physical characteristics foreign to those of other people, or races. What has happened in the more than a hundred and twenty-five years that have elapsed since the beginning of national existence is precisely similar to what has taken place in the animal and vegetable kingdoms. Take, for example, the seedless orange, a new species of a very old fruit. By careful selection and crossing there has been produced an orange that has lost some of the characteristics which mark the family and has acquired new qualities. The seed, without which at one time it was considered impossible to grow an orange, has been eliminated, and the new fruit has a flavor and texture of its own. Perhaps an even more striking illustration is the Citrus decumana, known to all Americans and to many Europeans under its popular name of the grape-fruit or the shaddock. In its original or native form, it was too bitter to be used as an article of diet, but by being crossed with the lemon and the orange its extreme acidity was modified and the fruit made palatable. Here a "new" species was developed, and, while it preserved the physical structure of the parent stock, developed its own character. In the first volume I said,1 - and I think the statement cannot be challenged, - "In 1 See page 20. 1 both the animal and the vegetable kingdoms species, by the irresistible law of evolution and their adjustment to new conditions, retain many of the characteristics of the parent stock, but by conforming to their environment in the struggle for existence create a new type." Darwin repeatedly points out that Nature is continually at work creating new species, or modifying existing ones to adapt them to their environment or the struggle for survival. Thus in North America, he says, "All the wolves, foxes, and aboriginal domestic dogs have their feet broader than in the corresponding species of the Old World, and well calculated for running on the snow"; and this, he remarks, is necessary, as the life or death of every animal will often depend upon its success in hunting over the snow when soft; and this will in part depend upon the feet being broad. Again he notes that in England "an entirely new foxhound was raised through the breeder's art, the ears of the old Southern hound being reduced, the bone and bulk lightened, the waist increased in length, and the stature somewhat added to. It is believed that this was effected by a cross with a greyhound. With respect to the latter dog, Youatt, who is generally cautious in his statements, says that the greyhound within the last fifty years, that is, before the commencement of the present century, assumed a somewhat dif 1 Darwin: The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, vol. I, p. 42. |