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riot by men impelled by the lust of gold, but by men who sought political freedom 
and liberty to worship God according to their conscience. They carried with them 
love of home, reverence for law, a dee}) sense of the inalienable rights of man, and 
the conviction that in their veins flowed the blood of Alfred and of the barons who 
extorted the Magna Charta from King John on the field of Runnymede; and here, 
with these convictions and with these traditions, they laid the foundations of what 
in the immediate future will be the mightiest nation which the world has ever seen. 
The Revolution of 1776 broke the political bonds which united the original colonies 
to the mother country; but it did not break the bonds of blood, of inherited tradi- 
tions, and of the glory which attached to the common inheritance. All the glorious 
ideals of the race have quickened, enlarged, and intensified; and have found realiza- 
tion to a degree which could never have been attained within the narrow limits of 
the original home in the Old World. The immemorial heritage of freedom brought 
by Angle and Jute and Saxon from the banks of the Saale to those of the Thames 
and the I lumber and the Dee, and after ages of growth within the British Isles 
transplanted to ampler fields in America has found its ultimate development in the 
great nation of whose origin and history we arc all so proud to-day. And it may 
surely be a source of legitimate pride to the mother country that the great empire, 
which neither the ambition of Louis XIV nor the conquering power of Napoleon 
could dismember, received its first rude shock from the courage which she had com- 
municated to her emancipated offspring, and that amid trans-Atlantic wilds grew up 
a race of men who have established real liberty on the principles which they inherited 
from ancestors who were the countrymen and compatriots of Bacon and Sidney, of 
Hampden and ( )liver Cromwell. 
In the United States of to-day even the busiest and the most actively employed in 
the intervals of leisure stop to inquire whence they came, what they art, and whither 
they tend. The apprehension has been felt and expressed that we are too much 
given up to the acquisition of wealth, too material, that we care nothing for the past, 
are absorbed in the cares of the present, and clothe the future in the draping of the 
accumulated gains built upon the foundations which w T e have laid. The hundreds 
have grown into the thousands, the thousands into the millions; we look to a future 
wh: n the latter shall have expanded into billions; and then the golden age in another 
sense than that .of the ancients will have superseded and supplanted all others, 
and wealth not brains will rule mankind. But wealth in the second generation, if 
not in the first, looks anxiously for a background of respectability. This is a whole- 
some feeling and a healthy indication. The wealthy long for something more than 
mere wealth to differentiate them from the masses. Energy and capacity and ability 
to accumulate wealth were indispensable, but these must have had an antecedent 
existence in the family. Heredity and atavism are assumed as the necessary condi- 
tions and these are sought for in family history. Family traditions, family records, 
title deeds, names and surnames, on this side the Atlantic and on the other, are 
eagerly examined, studied, collated, and translated into genealogies embodied in 
family trees with all the accessories of crests, mottoes, armorial bearings, and coats 
of arms. These ideas are not incompatible with republicanism. The Washingtons 
and Jeffersons and Adamses and Winthrops of colonial time were proud of their title 
deeds and genealogies and descent from the gentry and gentlemen and nobility of 
the mother country. Not only were the leaders in the American revolt of 177(5 gen- 
tlemen and the sons of gentlemen, but most of the noncommissioned orliecrs and men 
were of reputable English and Scotch and Irish descent. Gentlemen fought and 
won in the Revolutionary contest. In no subsequent war in which the United States 
has been engaged did the armies of the Republic contain so large a proportion of 
gentlemen. What, then, is called the modern craze for geneaology is a healthy, con- 
servative, mental condition, an effort, to discover, and if not to discover, to make a 
place in the annals of recorded or unrecorded gentility. Fortunately the original 
contributory elements which make up the history of the great Republic are not so 
difficult to discover. The early history of Puritan, Pilgrim, and Cavalier is well 
known. The politico-religious ferment which led to the emigration of the one and 
the spirit, of adventure which led to the voluntary expatriation of the other are 
matters of history. 
Other- contributory elements from Germany and Scandinavia and central and 
eastern Europe have swelled the population of this newer and mightier England 
which occupies the best half of the North American continent, but the basis, the 
backbone, the brain of the country remains and will remain Anglo-Saxon. Our 
history thus finds its l'oots in the history of the peoples of the Old World and pre- 
eminently in that of middle England, which stands midway between the Saxon of 
the Saale and the Saxon of America, Through our relations with them Robert 
Bruce and Bannockburn are ours; Hastings and Runnymede, Evesham and Crecy, 
