1 86 NA TIONA L GR WTH AND NA TIONA L CHA RA CTER 



still were as guerrilla sorties, producing little permanent effect 

 save by frequent repetition; hut the British colonial movement 

 in North America was as that of a well-ordered arm} 7 . Through- 

 out this era more than ever before the Briton tested his own 

 mettle; he came prepared to meet and overcome obstacles in- 

 surmountable by his contemporaries; when the ranks were 

 thinned by starvation, as at pitiful Plymouth and fated James- 

 town, by the Red Man's arrow or by strange disease, as at many 

 other outposts, or by occasional desertion all along the line, the 

 vacant places were filled with fresh recruits : and the vigorous 

 army rested only after victor} 7 over an inhospitable land beset by 

 forbidding forests and flanked by miasmatic marshes where war- 

 ring aborigines and strange ills lurked in cruel waiting for the un- 

 wary. Other countries added their forces in some measure, with 

 great ultimate benefit to the nation yet unborn ; but the char- 

 acter of the movement was shaped by the inherent power and 

 pertinacity of Britain's sons. 



The stock represented by the colonists was a notable one. 

 During the prehistoric ages, as the relics of caves and moorlands 

 tell, Europe was overrun by primitive tribes which slowly at- 

 tained the plane of pastoral and maritime culture; and the re- 

 mains and trappings of their domestic animals and the ruins of 

 their sea-going craft, which today enrich the museums of Eu- 

 rope, bear testimony to their prowess by land and sea. The 

 shadowy history of two millenniums supplements the prehistoric 

 record, and shows that the European tribes gained gradually in 

 strength and culture, partly by normal growth, partly by the 

 absorption of invading — -and sometimes conquering — peoples 

 from the east and south; the written record indicates, too, that 

 blood was mixed and culture interchanged in such manner as 

 to weld the tribes into larger groups, the germs of later nations. 

 Now, in some way blood enriches blood and culture fortifies 

 culture so effectively that, in all ages, it has been the people of 

 blended blood and commingled culture who have dominated 

 the continents and the world; and Europe was the first great 

 theater (as America is the second) for these obscure but potent 

 factors in human development. Most of the interactions were 

 naturally confined to the continent; but, under a peculiar com- 

 bination of geographic conditions, all the stronger streams of 

 blood and all the higher waves of culture ultimately impinged on 

 the adjacent isles of Great Britain and Little Britain — and with 

 such marvelous effect that this areally insignificant spot on the 



