had themselves an old and even a European ancestry. The American people was not born in 1776, it merely asserted that it had then attained its majority and was entitled to a natural and a national inheritance. It was heir to all the ages and to most of the countries of Europe. "For the sake of enjoying the sensation of being a peculiar people," protested an American historian in the opening year of the present century, "we are willing to forget the glorious heritage of a thousand years. There never has been a New World in the sense that principles have been developed here which were unknown elsewhere."

9

Nathaniel Hawthorne spoke of England as "our old home"; and a later writer asks "was not Elizabeth our queen? and Shakespeare our poet? and Drake our hero and protector when the Spanish Armada bore down on our fathers' shores?" But both these writers were New Englanders. "We are," said President Wilson in his second Inaugural,10 "a composite and a cosmopolitan people. We are of the blood of all the nations that are at war." That was no new doctrine. "Europe, and not England," declared Tom Paine in his Common Sense, "is the parent country of America." 11 That is partially true of the natural man, and there is a con

9A. B. Hart, American Foreign Policy, pp. 1-2.

10

President Wilson's Foreign Policy, ed. J. B. Scott, p. 269. "Cited in J. T. Adams, Revolutionary New England, p. 439; see figures in Channing, History of U.S.A. III. 528-30, and Max Farrand, Development of U.S.A. pp. 10-12.

siderable percentage of other than English blood in the American people, though possibly not greater than the proportion of other than Anglo-Saxon blood in the English people. For, writes Defoe: 12

Thus from a mixture of all kinds began

That heterogeneous thing, an Englishman.

But a nation is not a natural man. It consists of other and subtler things than race; and few Americans dispute the overwhelming predominance of English language and literature, law and thought, in American civilization.13 A common tongue is, however, an inadequate means of keeping the peace. It is itself an unruly member, and the English-speaking Union has to rely on other things than its English. The fact that we all spoke English did not prevent Great Britain from waging two wars on America, nor even Cavaliers from fighting Roundheads, and the North from fighting the South in the American Civil War. Understanding what others say has not always a soothing effect, and the peace of the Anglo-Saxon world would have been more often disturbed than it was, had science progressed so far in the nineteenth century as to enable patriotic journals to broadcast their daily compliments across the Atlantic Ocean.

12 The True-born Englishman.

"Every President of the United States but two has borne a British name; and of the two (Van Buren and Roosevelt) the latter would hardly be cited as evidence of an un-English strain in American politics.

A better security lies in the facts that the United States inherited English problems, and that its people were predisposed, also by inheritance and tradition, to treat them in a somewhat similar way. "We, too, are heirs of Runnymede," says Whittier,14 and there is an association for the celebration of Magna Carta which is more active in America than in England. There is not much sympathy for King John, and not a great deal for George III, on either side of the Atlantic. I do not know what would have happened to George, had he been caught in America during the Revolution, but he could hardly have been treated worse than we treated Charles I and James II; and to rebuke others for rebellion hardly becomes a people which, down to 1688, rebelled against half its kings. These were times which not only tried men's souls but in which they sometimes lost their heads. But in the due process of law there was little difference between English and American methods. "I hear," said Burke in his speech on conciliation with the colonies, "that they have sold as many of Blackstone's Commentaries in America as in England;" 15 and if Blackstone provided the colonists with their handbook of law, John Locke supplied them with their guide to revolution. That issue, too, was an English issue,

14 "To Englishmen," 1861, in Poetical Works (popular ed. p. 191).

15 Select Works, ed. J. F. Payne, 1. 182.

not merely in the one-sided sense that England was one of the parties to the conflict, but in the comprehensive sense that the arguments on both sides were English arguments. If Lord North and George III relied on the sovereignty of the English Parliament, the colonists appealed to the charters of English kings, to the works of English philosophers,16 and to their rights as Englishmen. The contest was a continuation of the conflict between English parties inthe seventeenth century, and it only broke out because our Declaration of Rights had failed to secure for American colonists the political rights it asserted for Englishmen at home. The American Revolution of 1776 is the second volume of the English Revolution of 1688.

The tradition did not cease with American independence nor limit itself to law and domestic politics. Runnymede and the philosophy of nature were not the only English things to which America was heir. It has also been the heir to England's wars, and not merely in the beneficial sense that the enviable security, which has enabled the United States to become so profoundly anti-militarist, has been largely due to Wolfe's conquest of Quebec, but because the United States came into the less pacific heritage of English quarrels with other countries over possessions in the New World. Since 1815 the British Empire has fought no wars origi16 Cf. Carl Becker, The Declaration of Independence, pp. 35-79.

nating in that hemisphere because her legatee has been the United States, and with the assets of the British Empire the United States took over its share in the liabilities. A list of its wars would illustrate the point. The first country with which it was involved in hostilities after the recognition of independence was France, with which it had lately been in alliance, but with which Great Britain had been at war throughout a great part of the century. The next was a war with the Barbary pirates; and in the early years of the nineteenth century we find American commanders bombarding Moorish ports, just as Blake did in the time of Oliver Cromwell and Lord Exmouth did in 1816. Next to France, England's chief enemy had been Spain; and if America's most profitable wars were waged with Mexico rather than Spain, it was only because the liberation of Spanish America had deprived it of Spanish protection; the unliberated parts of that empire were conquered in 1898. The war against Mexico in the eighteenforties was described by Americans in the true Elizabethan vernacular as one between "the invincible Anglo-Saxon race" and "superstitious Catholicism goaded on by a miserable priesthood." 17 Thus did the United States conclude the chapter begun by Elizabethan sea-dogs; and in the latest and greatest of their wars the English-speaking peoples were not divided. It was the first in which either had