Disappearing British Stock In The United States

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 19136, 3 October 1936, Page 9

Disappearing British Stock In The United States

Jyj'R. Arthur Bryant, in his mnv book, “The American Ideal,’’ gives a shook to those people who think that the English stock still counts for a great deal in the United States, for lie points out that this was hardly true two centuries ago.

“The Englishman in America? By the eighteenth century the description was ceasing to be true,” says Air. Bryant. “A few generations of life in the new country had already made a. change in the English stock. “’Pile high cheekbones, the keen look, the tierce rangy speech of modern American were beginning to lie noticed as trans-Atlantic phenomena; the sleepy, good-humoured lion of the old world seemed to bo taking ,on talons and wings. Western air in Saxon lungs, the blood of western animals in the veins, the habits of mind and body formed by the battle for life in the western world were making a. new race of men. “’Pile old English love of law and home was still there, but something fierce and primitive was being added. Soon an eagle would take the air. . . . American Aristocracy. “The use of transported African labour for the cultivation of tobacco on a large scale made the white colonists of Virginia rich without the necessity of working. Estates which had been almost worthless when granted to seventeenth-century pioUJßers provided their descendants with princely incomes. By the middle of the eighteenth century an American aristocracy had come into being in the tobacco-growing South. , . . “Tu silk stockings and powdered wigs, they conducted their political, anti social round according to the decorous conventions of their English motherland, and maintained in more ways than one the English tic. Vet in their innermost hearts England was no longer their country. “The stately and slow-witted nobles whom the Court of St. dames’ sent to govern them, Ihe stupid military officers whose pretences to precedence so maddened their provincial pride, the unimaginative officials who tried to organise their lives, appeared to them increasingly as strangers. Love of Liberty. “The real England of hallowed field and parish lore, which had bred their forefathers, they had never known. Instead they turned in deep, if unexpressed, love to the beautiful and spacious land which gave them and their 'children so rich and friendly a life. From its forests and rivers and ever-bcekoning distances, as much as from the stubborn legal formulas of the unknown inland from which their stock had come, their passionate love of individual liberty was derived.” Air. Bryant’s main purpose, however, is to interpret those sons of America who had at heart great ideals for their country and his short biographies of Thomas .TefTerson, Abraham Lincoln, Emerson. Whitman and Theodore Roosevelt, contain just the facts which British people should know and understand if they are to have a true estimate of the United States.