204 THE FRENCH BLOOD IN AMERICA 



Palfrey 



Fiske 



and this theory has been largely accepted as sufficient to 

 account for all dissimilarities. It has been generally be- 

 lieved that a clearer, sunnier air has browned the race 

 permanently, and begotten nervousness of physical and 

 mental constitution. It is assumed that there could have 

 been no more powerful, and indeed no other intervening 

 cause. In support of this conclusion it is pointed out 

 that the New England colonists were purely and ex- 

 clusively English. Palfrey contends that the population 

 ''continued to multiply for a century and a half on its 

 own soil, in remarkable seclusion from other communi- 

 ties." John Fiske accepts Palfrey's statement, and cites 

 Savage as demonstrating, after painstaking labours, that 

 ninety-eight out of every hundred of the early settlers 

 could trace their descent directly to an English ancestry. 

 These authorities would leave us no alternative but to 

 conclude that climate alone must have wrought the re- 

 markable transformation of mind, character and body, 

 through which have been evolved and fixed the idiosyn- 

 crasies of the New Englander. 



Not a Suf- 

 ficient Cause 



The True 

 Cause 



II 



But if climate was the potent cause, why did not the 

 changes appear in the first century of colonial life ? In 

 1776 the portraits of the men who won our liberties show 

 us veritable Englishmen. Yet in 1863 the change had 

 come about, and Hawthorne found the two peoples rad- 

 ically different. Climate is much slower in its effects than 

 this. The truth is, it is impossible that the Yankee could 

 have been so greatly differentiated from the Englishman 

 in three or four generations merely from exposure to a 

 climate but little unlike that of Great Britain. Having 

 disposed of this fallacious theory, the search for an ef- 

 fective cause begins, and later historical researches have 

 made it plain. This transformation came from mixtui^e 

 of bloods, fi'om intermarriage between the early English 

 colonists and some race of a slighter build, a less sombre 



