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a native American for England, those politicians make their fundamental psychological error.
England, despite the contentions of trifling theorists, is not and never will be a really foreign country; nor is a true love of America possible without a corresponding love for the British race and ideals that created America. The difficulties which caused the severance of the American Colonies from the rest of the Empire were essentially internal ones, and have no moral bearing on this country's attitude toward the parent land in its relations with alien civilisations. Just as Robert Edward Lee chose to follow the government of Virginia rather than that of the Federal Union in 1861, so did the Anglo-American Revolutionary loaders choose local to central allegiance in 1775. Their rebellion was in itself a characteristically English act, and could in no manner annul the purely English origin and nature of the now republic. American history before the conflict of 1775-1783 is English history, and we are lawful heirs of the unnumbered glories of the Saxon line. Shakespeare and Milton, Dryden and Pope, Young and Thomson, Johnson and Goldsmith, are our own poets, William the Conqueror, Edward the Black Prince, Elizabeth and William of Nassau are our own royalty; Crecy, Poitiers, and Agincourt are our own victories; Lord Bacon, Sir Isaac Newton, Hobbes, Locke, Sir Robert Boyle, and Sir William Herschel are our own philosophers and scientists; what true American lives, who would wish, by rejecting an Englishman's heritage, to despoil his country of such racial laurels? Let those men be silent, who would in envy, deny to the citizens of the United States the right to cherish and revere the ancestral honours that are theirs, and to remain faithful to the Anglo-Saxon ideals of their English forefathers!
Since the establishment of a republic by the Englishmen of the American Colonies, millions of non-British persons have been admitted to share the liberty which English hands created. In many cases, these immigrants have proved valuable accessions, and when accepting fully the ideals of Anglo-American culture, those of them who are of North European blood have become completely amalgamated with the American people. Germans, in particular, being of identical racial stock, are able to fuse quickly and wholly into the Colonial population. But as they become Americans, so must they also, in a sense, become Englishmen. When the Elector of Hanover, a thorough German, acceded to the English throne, it was his duty to become an English monarch: and in a similar way it is an obligation of all other non-English individuals, princes or peasants, to adopt Anglo-Saxon ideals when they come to reap the advantages of an Anglo-Saxon nation. That millions of virile Germans have done so, is a gratifying fact to consider.
But since alien immigration has far exceeded normal proportions, it is but natural that we have among us an alarmingly vast body of foreigners from various countries who are totally unable to appreciate Anglo-American traditions. If not still attached to their respective nations, they are at least prone to regard the United States as a sort of spontaneously evolved territory without previous history or ancestry. Forgetting the Saxon inheritance that gave us language, laws, and liberty, they speak of America as a composite nation whose
