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Where is it all going? Is it drifting southward as I am, to Mexico, to Empire? Will it stay where it is and wax more illustrious? "Tell me where you have come from and I will tell you where you are going," saith the Cynic. "An evil crow, an evil egg." America as a nation was born in the throes of the War of North and South. Or it rose out of Washingtonian independence and Jeffersonian idealism. Or it arose from the Puritanism of the Pilgrim Fathers, or from the adventure spirit of the gentlemen of Virginia. From such origins one could chart some kind of destiny. But not with surety. One must go further back to the spirit of Elizabethan sailors, to Drake, and a thousand others. Latin America derives from the Conquistadores of Spain, but Anglo-Saxon America derives as surely from the English conquerors. America was Imperial before she was Democratic, and English before she was American. But then again the English, or at least the Saxons, were a sturdy, independent race, intolerant of bondage, urgent for their civic rights, always proud of freedom. If there is one thing that is with difficulty soluble in Anglo-Saxondom, it is character. It is by virtue of character that England has been a ruler of peoples, and possibly again it is character as much as business and excessive wealth and a leisured class that will lead America along her road of destiny. It is still in the air as to which road that will be—the way of Roosevelt or the way of Lincoln.