"Not skeptical, Pelham; but.... Put it this way. It hasn't the overwhelming importance to me that it has to you. To me, woman's cause comes first; with suffrage an essential incident. I do see that socialism doesn't go to the roots of everything."
He exclaimed lazily, "Of course not! And I like, more and more, your idea, that floated hazily out one night—that geography lay beneath all the economic forces we socialists orate over."
"On behalf of my intelligence, I thank you," she teased.
"Silly! The idea is underneath Marx and the rest; but it hasn't been said clearly yet. I've dipped into more American history, these workless weeks; it fits amazingly there....
"This stuff the professors wax magniloquent over, that America was planned as a land of freedom! Mere fudge and fury! Who planned it free? The Spaniards, arrogant haters of the common people? The paternalistic French? The Dutch and Swedes, just as committed to autocracy?..."
"There were the 'freedom-loving Englishmen'...."
"Jamestown, settled by gold-hunting, venturesome gentlemen of King James' Court! So Maryland, and the Carolinas; with Georgia merely to give an opportunity for homeland failures to build a younger England, casted as the old. Plymouth, all of New England, except Rhode Island, wanted merely State Puritanism, under the old feudal system. Roger Williams was an exception; Penn's inner light saw a vision of ultimate democracy. But—two out of thirteen!"
"No, it wasn't planning that made democracy and freedom our spreadeagle catchwords," she agreed.
"It was the land," he took up the thread. "The land has expressed itself, and will express itself more magnificently in the future, in the achieved reality of those Fourth of July slogans. Pioneer hardships develop men equal in their labors and their needs; crude democracy thrives along civilization's frontiers. The restless Arabs, the migratory Israelites, grew brotherhood as self-protection. Europe's cramping strait-jackets could not fit empty miles of prairie, or stream and mountain and farm-land ready to mint gold when man's labor was poured on them."
"The idea helps clear history," she helped on the mood. "Protected Egypt and Babylon, guarded by desert and sea and swamp, grew a hot-housed tyranny because of their over-fertile rivers; somewhat as New Orleans here."