My native land—good night!"
and Fitz-Greene Halleck, in his patriotic poem "Marco Bozzaris," bids strike "For God, and your native land."
Scott's far-famed lines:—
"Breathes there a man with soul so dead,
Who never to himself has said,
This is my own, my native land!"
and Smith's national hymn, "My country,'tis of thee," know no mother-land.
In the great Century Dictionary, the only illustration cited of the use of the word mother-land is a very recent one, from the Century Magazine (vol. xxix. p. 507).
Shakespeare, however, comes very near it, when, in King John (V. ii.), he makes the Bastard speak of "your dear Mother-England," —but this is not quite "mother-land."
In German, though, through the sterner influences which surrounded the Empire in its birth and reorganization, Vaterland is now the word, Mutterland was used by Kant, Wieland, Goethe, Herder, Uhland, etc. Lippert suggests an ingenious explanation of the origin of the terms Mutterland, Vaterland, as well as for the predominance of the latter and younger word. If, in primitive times, man alone could hold property,—women even and children were his chattels,—yet the development of agriculture and horticulture at the hands of woman created, as it were, a new species of property, property in land, the result of woman's toil and labour; and this new property, in days when "mother-right" prevailed, came to be called Mutterland, as it was essentially "mothers' land." But when men began to go forth to war, and to conquer and acquire land that was not "mothers' land," a new species of landed property,—the "land of the conquering father,"—came into existence (and with it a new theory of succession, "father-right"), and from that time forward "Vaterland" has extended its signification, until it has attained the meaning which it possesses in the German speech of to-day (492. 33, 36).
The inhabitants of the British colonies scattered all over the world speak of Britain as the "mother country," "Mother England"; and R. H. Stoddard, the American poet, calls her "our Mother's Mother." The French of Canada term France over-sea "la mère patrie" (mother fatherland).
Even Livy, the Roman historian, wrote terra quam matrem appellamus,—"the land we call mother,"—and Virgil speaks of Apollo's native Delos as Delum maternum. But for all this, the proud Roman called his native land, not after his mother, but after his father, patria; so also in corresponding terms the Greek, [Greek: patris], etc. But the latter remembered his mother also, as the word metropolis, which we have inherited, shows. [Greek: Maetropolis] had the meanings: "mother-state" (whence daughter-colonies went forth); "a chief city, a capital, metropolis; one's mother-city, or mother-country." In English, metropolis has been associated with "mother-church," for a metropolis or a metropolitan city, was long one which was the seat of a bishopric.