WHAT IS AMERICA? CHAPTER I THE MAKE-UP OF THE PEOPLE HAT distinguishes the thirteen English WHA colonies planted in North America from most colonies is that a third or more of the original settlers of the former left the Old World in order to escape from some form of religious or political oppression. This made the American people rich in precious human strains which have never run out. Probably even now a fourth part of their blood comes from the twenty thousand English Puritans who came to Massachusetts and Connecticut between 1618 and 1640. It endowed them also with traditions of liberty and idealism which continually rise to the surface to confound those who sneer at Americans as "dollar-hunters." In the seventeeth century the chief non-English strains woven into the white population of the colonies were the Dutch, who settled New 3 Netherland, which later became the colony of New York, and a few thousand splendid French Huguenots. In the eighteenth century came great numbers of Scotch, of Irish Presbyterians from the province of Ulster, and of Germans from the ravaged lands on the upper Rhine. These last settled in Pennsylvania and became the ancestors of those whom we call the "Pennsylvania Dutch." At the time of the first census, in 1790, the young nation had less than three million whites, of whom, to judge by family names, 83.5 per cent. were of English stock; 6.7 per cent. Scotch; 5.6 per cent. German; 2 per cent. Dutch; 1.6 per cent. Irish, and 0.5 per cent. French. Meanwhile the conditions were converting this mixture of unlike elements into a new people. Of every generation some left the family roof-tree to go out and settle in the roomy West. Generally these wanderers were bigger and stronger of body than those who stayed behind. In the Civil War the recruits from interior states were found to be taller and heavier than the recruits from seaboard states. Of course the sons of the old distinguished families did not migrate, but, in general, those who went west must have excelled in energy and venturesomeness their kinsmen who stayed where they were born. It was the trout rather than the carp that left the pool in order to get into the swift water. Now, the wanderers "out West" multiplied faster than the stay-at-homes. With land aplenty and prospects bright, they married earlier and they raised bigger families. Small wonder, then, that for a hundred years, in the population of our younger states, the proportion of children has been from thirty to a hundred per cent. greater than in the older states. In this simple, natural way the bold and pushful gained in numbers on the timid, inert sort and came to constitute an ever-larger part of the American people. No one maintains that the American breed surpasses the mother stocks overseas in brainpower or sensibility; but for fifty years all European visitors have been struck by the wonderful energy and enterprise of the Americans. We see now that there is nothing strange in this, for these are just the qualities which are made more abundant as the wilderness is settled. Here is the secret of the large number of forceful men in the ordinary American community. Here, too, is the explanation of the high |