America is a palace of a thousand windows, some of them opening on the past and some of them looking toward the future; and in my letters to you I have tried to open a few of the windows that look back into our pasts; magic casements they are, for we have as many pasts as we have races in America. And two things I have tried to tell you about those races:
Why they came to America
and
What they brought to America.
Turn over the pages of the letters, if you have kept them, and you will find that they are really chapters in a short history of America’s colonists and immigrants. All the chapters are not written yet, all the windows are not opened; some day perhaps there will be a Scandinavian chapter to tell us why the hardy, industrious Norse and Swedes are here, farming our northwestern prairies, and what gifts they brought to make America more beautiful; and some day we may open a Dutch window, looking across the perilous sea from old New York to Holland.
But this time, my letter is not a little chapter of past history, for most of the young people in this story are descendants of the Puritans who settled New England and the Cavaliers who settled Virginia; and we already know by heart those two chapters of our past. Don’t we? Plymouth Rock, Paul Revere, Pocahontas:
“A cargo of tea
Thrown into the sea,
In seventeen-hundred
And sixty-three.”