"Thomas Dudley, writing to England from New England in its earliest days, when, as he frankly owns, it offered 'little to be enjoyed and much to be endured,' is explicit as to the class of men he and his colleagues would have join them. He invites only godly men of substance. Such, he says, 'cannot dispose of themselves and their estates more to God's glory.' Those who would 'come to plant for worldly ends' he dissuades altogether; for 'the poorer sort' it was 'not time yet.' As for reckless adventurers and the destitute idle, who sought the New World for gold or an indolent subsistence, when these, 'seeing no other means than by their labor to feed themselves,' went back discouraged, or off to find some more indulgent plantation, the colony felt itself 'lightened, not weakened.'
"The chief distinctive mark of high race is the quality the Romans called fortitudo,—a word of larger meaning than we commonly intend by ours derived from it: that strength of soul, namely, which gives way as little before work as before danger or under suffering. A Roman has defined this Roman fortitude as the quality which enables a man fearlessly to obey the highest law, whether by enduring or by achieving.
"Another mark of high race is its trust in itself. The early heads of New England did not try to secure a position to their children. They knew that blood finds its level just as certainly as water does. Degenerate sons they disowned in advance.
"Westlake, you ought to know New England better. Even if your memory did not prompt you to do it justice, there ought to be a voice to answer for it in your heart. But I find ancestry is very soon lost in the mists of antiquity down here. You come early into the advantages of a mythical background. Must I teach you your own descent?"
"I thank you. I am acquainted with it. My great-grandfather was an Englishman,—a man of some consideration, as I have been informed. He went over to Massachusetts; but my grandfather left it, as soon as he was of age, for a newer State, where he could enjoy greater freedom."
"Your great-grandfather came from England to New England, as you say. He fixed himself in that part of our Massachusetts town of Ipswich which used to go by the name of 'The Hamlet.' What he was before he came out I do not know; but I suppose he brought credentials, for he married his wife from a family both old and old-fashioned. Your grandfather, Simeon Symonds Westlake, at seventeen found the Hamlet too narrow for him, and the paternal, or perhaps the maternal, rule too strict. He walked over into New Hampshire one morning, without mentioning that he was not to be back for dinner. New Hampshire did not suit him: he went to Rhode Island; then tried New York for a year or so: it did not answer. His father died, and Simeon made experiment of life at home again, but only again to give it up in disgust. Finally he emigrated to Georgia, taking with him a little money and a great deal of courage; invested both in a small farm which was soon a large plantation; added a yet larger by marriage; died, a great landholder and a great slaveholder.
"Simeon—I must call him by that name, historical for me, although I know that the first initial disappeared from his signature after his marriage—Simeon left two sons, Reginald and Edwin. He had the ambition of founding a dynasty; so left his whole estate to the elder, yet with certain restrictions and conditions, which, doubtless, he had good reasons for imposing, and which the intended heir lost no time in justifying. By some law of inheritance which statutes cannot supersede nor wills annul, this son of a father in whom no worst enemy could have detected a trace of the Puritan, was born in liberal Georgia, in the last half of the enlightened eighteenth century, as arrogant a bigot and as flaming a fanatic as if he had come over in the Mayflower. He refused his father's bequest, on the ground that God has given man dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowls of the air, and over the cattle,—but none over his fellow-man, except such as he may win through affection or earn by service. He went back to New England, where he belonged. I knew a son of his, a respectable mason. You need not blush for him, though he was your own cousin and worked with his hands. He was never conscious of any cause for shame, himself, unless it were the sin of his slaveholding grandfather; and that did not weigh on him, for he believed the entail of the curse cut off with that of the rest of the inheritance.
"If I have grieved the shade of Simeon by pronouncing that rejected name, I will soothe it again by stating that this name has not been perpetuated by his New-England descendants. That branch of his house has already a third Reginald, about a year younger than yours. He is now a Freshman in college. You may hear of him some day."
"He is in college? That is well. He has, then, recovered, or will recover, the rank of a gentleman?"