We Americans are a Peculiar People
Even among the various nationalities of the white race there are very great differences of character and temperament. To try to overlook these, to declare that they do not exist, is both dishonest and dangerous. Moved by the inspiration of a common cause in the Great War, no doubt the American troops and the French people made every possible effort to be agreeable and companionable. Still their very real differences caused friction. We recognize all sorts of peculiar characteristics among individuals. Why this folly of trying to deny their existence among nations? Sound conclusions in any matter are reached only by starting with facts. But the humanitarian and sentimental purposes which some of us have in mind often lead to the misuse of facts. Self-deception is the very last support upon which to build a sense of international or interracial friendship and good will.
Democracy, as a working system, as we have said in previous articles, is peculiar to a few nations of the white race. As such it is perhaps the greatest social and spiritual adventure in the history of humanity. Democracy can thrive only where it sinks its roots deep into the personality of the individual soul. In a successful democracy the citizen must be free, honest, intelligent, informed, sportsmanlike, and willing to be always active in the performance of his political duties. These qualities can not be brought forth by the hocus-pocus of wishing them upon anybody. They are the result of a long evolution. They have grown, thus far, only in particular environments and only among peculiar peoples whose whole history furnishes the essential background.
It is often pointed out as an evidence of the success which follows the mixing of our various nationalities, that we original Americans have resulted from the greatest of all mixtures. We began, in Colonial times, as English, Welsh, Scotch and Irish; as French, Dutch, German and Swedish elements. The results of this mixture, we conclude, have been entirely satisfactory. But right here we are apt to come to error.
True, the original American people were formed by the mixture of these various nationalities. Yet the success of out great experiment was due to the fact of a much greater social unity than at first appears on the surface. Our American people were drawn, mostly, from a single European class. This was the class of small property-holders and skilled workers. They came from the progressive countries to the north and west of Europe. What members of the British country gentry who came to Virginia and South Carolina were quickly unified with those among whom they settled. Indeed, ever since Magna Charta, the English country gentry were thrown together, especially in the House of Commons, with the representatives of the small farmers and the towns people. To ignore this fact of essential unity is to leave Hamlet out of the play. The dominant group, the great majority in every colony, was this mixture of gentry, independent small farmers, shopkeepers and skilled mechanics. This was then the rising class of Europe, struggling to find itself; hungering to give expression of its peculiar form of civilization; ardent in its desire for larger freedom. These facts can not be over-emphasized.
The original settlers, in large part, came to America to find the freedom and political opportunity they so richly deserved. If they did not, at once, always grant freedom to others in their own settlements, there was plenty of room for the others elsewhere. The Baptists, driven out of Massachusetts, found refuge in Rhode Island. The Quakers, whipped out of New England, discovered room and to spare in Pennsylvania. The Cavaliers, forced into exile during the Puritanic tyranny of the Commonwealth period, settled in Virginia and South Carolina. When the French Protestants came, after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, they were not really foreigners in America. They possessed the same faith, they were guided by exactly the same system of morals, they were the same class of people basically, as those among whom they settled. One of the most liberal and democratic groups to organize a colony were the English Catholics of Maryland. The secret of understanding the beginnings of America is to know that there was room for everybody and for everybody's beliefs. Even the bigot in Europe eventually became the liberal here. The indentured servant, of whom there were comparatively few, eventually found freedom and acquired property in the wilderness.