THE SONS OF THE SETTLERS 
hearts as a national individualism had its 
inception and its nurture in a New England 
environment. But this is not all and it is 
not enough. There is still a réle in the 
nation’s march of progress for the East to 
play, a role no less important than her past 
activities, but pregnant with new-born 
ideals and new conceptions of duty and 
usefulness. It is a mission of regeneration, 
already finding expression, and in scope 
and portent worthy of every precious 
heritage of the past. 
It is a commonplace of evolutionary 
theory that human progress expresses itself 
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in a succession of wave-forms, in cycles of 
achievement, each of which, in crumbling 
at the fulfillment of its predestined height, 
transmits to its successor a portion of its 
original force and virtue. Thus it is that 
the endeavor and accomplishment of past 
generations are never wholly of the past, but 
live on as part and parcel of the present 
into the ever-unfolding future. 
All over the earlier settled sections of this 
continent, in every hamlet and village that 
played its little part in the heroic conquest 
of this new land of ours, lie the graves of the 
settlers. Here, perhaps, you shall chance 

They have mingled their dust with the soil upon which they labored for liberty and 
a living, but . . . the spirit and incentive which upheld them in their 
struggle have not gone down into the grave with them 
