"'And I?' said the Parisian to her, detaining her by the floating border of her tunic.
"'I had forgotten you.'
"'Entirely forgotten, madam.'
'"I overlooked you. But what can I do? My bag of gifts is empty.'
"She reflected an instant, and then called around her the recipients of her gifts, told them the situation, and asked them to share their treasures with their unfortunate sister. Who could refuse a fairy, and above all the Blue Fairy? So, with the graciousness always conferred by happiness, these girls in turn approached the neglected Parisian and as they passed her one threw her a part of her black hair, another a tint of her rosy complexion; this one a beam of her joyousness, that one a touch of her sensibility; and thus it came about that the Parisian, so poor, so obscure, so eclipsed by her sisters, found herself in an instant, by this generous division, richer and more attractively endowed than any of her companions."
Now this charming little parable is by courtesy true of the Parisienne; but it is far truer of the American woman, for of her it might have been written as a parable indeed. The product of no one blood, no isolated race, she has been given by the fusion of variant races in her ancestry an origin and a tradition, both physical and mental, such as has been granted to no other woman of whom history tells us. Into the ancestry of the English woman entered the elements of the Celtic blood, Brythonic and Goidal, of the Saxons and Teutons, of the later Normans and even Provençals, while through all, perhaps, ran the strain of the primitive Briton and Pict; but not even in this mingling of races can she compare with her American sister in diversity of racial source. Moreover, the English stock, which we unite in calling--incorrectly--the Anglo-Saxon, has remained permanent in type and fount; but this is not so with the American. This latter is in constant process of modification by the introduction of new progenital elements, and it cannot now be prophesied when there will be a clearly-defined race, with individual and permanent characteristics, established upon this side of the great seas.
Therefore the American woman is the heir of the ages in a sense never before true of anyone. As with the Parisian in the story, so with the American woman in truth, all races have united in bringing her of their best gifts. It is for her to make of these the best that she may; certainly none of her sisters has ever begun her career with such fortune brought her by destiny as a birth-gift.
It must not, however, be forgotten or unnoted that, while the American woman is thus rich in a heritage unequalled by that granted to any of her sisters, being world-heir instead of heir to a race, she has some corresponding disadvantages to overcome in her effort to influence as a racial representative the currents of world-thought and world-progress. She has behind her no national tradition stretching far back into a past so remote that it has ceased to be effect and has become merely foundation. The American woman, alone of all the representatives of the higher cultures, has no effective nationality to shape her trend. She is a product of her time only, not of time and ancient tradition mingled; she has no distinct nationality of growth and line of progress. Every other woman of Caucasian race has a past to which to refer as inspiration and cause, a past which is a story of upward growth, of ever-increasing culture. The American woman found her culture ready for her--was already, at her birth, the child and expression of the highest civilization known to her day. She had no need of exerting formative influence upon her race; all was already done to her hand. Thus she lacks the greatest of all traditions--the tradition of growth and development.
Yet, though not of native production, though lacking the influence of constant-trending nationality, the American woman is and always has been strongly individual. While she is not an indigenous development, not a result of racial growth and broadening, yet her development has been essentially characteristic. She has reached forward upon lines of variant trend from those of her sisters of other cultures, and she is truly a product of her country in that she has been shaped by the conditions of the time and circumstances of that country's birth. There was breathed into her from the first the informing spirit of the typical American civilization the spirit of freedom. And into her nature has also come another spirit distinctively American--the spirit of the wilderness subdued and conquered, of a barren land made to yield its treasures to the arm of the pioneer the spirit of conquest. There is no new gift of mind or soul brought to her by other nations that has not been modified by these twin spirits. Thus, though heir to all nations and peoples, though product of all cultures, she remains typically American in dominant traits, in the path in which she has chosen to set her feet. Latin and Teuton, Slav and Celt, she has in her veins the blood of them all; but she is still less their result than their modification, and she is still the child of America even more than of the world which has given her life.
The conditions under which the northern continent of America was first settled were somewhat peculiar as contrasted with those of any other settlement whose full history we know. It was entirely different, for example, from the settlement of South America or Mexico. In both the latter cases there was what may be described as a blow and a victory; there was a conquest over a primitive, even if remarkably civilized people, and that was the end of the matter save for the mere formal colonization which followed. This was not the case with the colonization of North America. There was no overt or complete conquest; on the contrary, there was at first overture of peace between the inhabitants of the country and the newcomers. This did not last; the whole of the first history of the colonization of North America may be summed up, at least in its most prominent aspect, in one word--war. But this warfare was not decisive; it was not waged against a nation, but against nations, fighting individually and jealously of each other indeed,--else they must have prevailed at first,--but yet constantly bringing forward new disputants of the title of the newcomers to the land.