By "definition of America" I mean neither epigrams nor statistics; we are defined by everything which separates and distinguishes us from others. We are, for instance, the only country lying between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and 25° 35' and 49° north latitude. This definition is exact and complete; it is neither a boast nor a criticism; it establishes no superiority or inferiority; it is a fact, the consequences of which are tremendously significant (our varied climate, our resources, our bigness with its consequences in the temper of the people, all go back to this mathematical fact.)
Not all the distinguishing marks of our country can be expressed in mathematical terms; if they could be, we would avoid the danger of jingo pride, the logical error of making every difference into a superiority. Moreover, if we had mathematics, we should be able to put on one side what we have in common with other countries, on the other what is exclusively ours—and make a comparison, a guide to international conduct "on scientific principles". We would know how far our likeness joined us to others, so that we could lay a firm basis for action; and how far our differences required compromises or made compromise impossible.
We lack mathematics; our physical boundaries are fixed, but our social boundaries are fluid, our national "genius" escapes definition. Yet we can describe these imponderables even if we cannot force them into a diagram, and their vital significance is as great as any statistics can be. It is a fact that millions of people came to America in the hope of a better life—the number who came can be written down, the intensity of hope can be guessed; and only a compassionate imagination can say what this country gained by the hopes fulfilled or lost by those which ended in despair. Yet the elation and the disillusion of men and women are both reflected in our laws and customs; and so far as they did not occur in other lands, they are factors in defining the great complex of our national character.
We are defined by events—immigration was an event. But immigrants came to other countries as well, to Canada and Brazil and England. When they came and in what numbers becomes the defining mark for us. It is self-evident that we are different from all other nations both absolutely and relatively; no other nation lies within our boundaries or has all our habits, because none has had our history—that is the base of absolute difference; all other nations share something with us, but we differ from each relatively—in some degree. This would not be worth mentioning if chauvinism did not insist that we differed (and were superior) in all things, while a base cosmopolitanism insisted that we were alike in all things and should be made more so. The corrective for each of these errors is to see what we are.
The Revolution in Property
When this country was settled the ownership of land was the most important economic factor in the lives of all Western peoples. The ruling class in Europe was a "landed aristocracy"; the poor had become poorer because they had usually been gradually driven off the land (as in England) or forced to pay outrageous rents (as in France). In the thirteen original colonies alone we had almost as many square miles of land as France and England together and this seemingly immeasurable area was only the fringe, the shore line, of Continental America; the Mississippi Valley had been explored, and the Southwest, so that the French and Spanish people shared, to an extent, in the hopes which unlimited land offered to the dispossessed.
Before the Declaration of Independence had been uttered, a revolution in the deepest instincts of man had taken place—land became a commodity of less permanence than a man's musket or horse. In Europe, land was to be built upon (literally and symbolically; ducal or royal Houses were founded on land); land was real estate, everything else was by comparison trifling; land was guarded by laws, property laws, laws of inheritance, laws of trespass, laws governing rents and foreclosures; far above laws governing human life was the law governing property, and the greatest property was land; title to property often carried with it what we call "a title" today; count and marquis, their names signify "counties" and "marches" of land; and the Prince (or Princeps) was often the first man in the land because he was the first owner of the land. Land was the one universal permanent thing; upon it men were born; over it they slaved or rode in grandeur; in it they were buried.
The American pioneer began to abandon his land, his farm in the clearing of the wilderness, before 1776. He moved away, westward, and complained against King George's legal fence around the land beyond the Alleghenies. The European transplanted to America often founded a House, notably in the aristocratic tradition of the Virginia tidewater; but most of the colonists lacked money or inclination to buy land in quantities; they went inland and took what they needed (often legally, often by squatters' right—which is the right of work, not of law); and then, for a number of reasons, they left the land and went further into the wilderness and made another clearing.
There is something magnificent and mysterious about this mania to move which overtook men when they came to America. Perhaps the primal instinct of man, to wander with his arrow or with his flock, reasserted itself after generations of the hemmed-in life of European cities; perhaps it was some uneasiness, some insecurity in themselves—or some spirit of adventure which could not be satisfied so long as a river or a forest or a plain lay unexplored. Romance has beglamored the pioneer and he has been called rude names for his "rape of a continent". I have once before quoted Lewis Mumford's positively Puritan rage at the pioneer who did not heed Wordsworth's advice to seek Nature "in a wise passiveness"—advice based on the poet's love for the English Lake district, about as uncivilized then as Northern Vermont is today. The raging pioneer, says Mumford, "raped his new mistress in a blind fury of obstreperous passion". Our more familiar figure of the pioneer in a coonskin cap, leading the way for wife and children, is the romantic counterpart of this grim raper who wasn't aware of the fact that Rousseau and Wordsworth didn't like what he was doing.
He was doing more to undermine the old order than Rousseau ever did. The moment land ceased to be universally the foundation of wealth and position, the way was open for wealth based on the machine—which is wealth made by hand, not inherited, wealth made by the industry of one man or group of men; it was wealth made by things in motion, not by land which stands still. The whole concept of aristocracy began to alter—for the worse. If wealth could be made, then wealth became a criterion; presently the money-lender (on a large scale) became respectable; presently money itself became respectable. It was divorced from land, from power, and from responsibility; a few generations later the new money bought up land to be respectable—but not responsible.