The Montgomery advertiser., 1901-07-09
CHAPTER I. The Founding of . Nation.


 The Founding of Nation.
 Oliver Wendell Holmes was asked, When ought the training of a child to begin?" and he replied: "A hundred years before the child Is born"
 Heredity counts in national life as in individual. The expansion of the United States under the constitution was forshadowed in the colonial his tory. A favorite phrase with many has been .he manifest destiny" of the United States. If there Is such a thing it was manifest before our national in- dependence and union.
 Rightly to understand the later ex- pansion of our territory and people 1t will be necessary to see how and why our nation began as English at all rather than Spanish or French or. Dutch. When the term English" Is used 1t must be understood in a com prehensive way as indicating simply the dominance of the English language and English institutions. Anglo Saxon" is no more exact, and Eng fish" is meant to include not merely people of strictly English origin, but Scotch and Irish and also those of con- tinental European origin who have cast in their lot with us and are being as- simila ted.
 Professor Sloane says. speaking of the time just previous to the outbreak of the French and Indian war: Although there were people of other nationalities in the colonies who left their mark fin many a virtuous habit or curious idiosyncrasy. yet 1t was never theless fairly homogeneous population of about 100000, bearing a civiliza- tion throughly English. which dwelt along the seaboard from the Bay of Fundy to Florida"
 The discovery and the earliest settle ment of North America were by men of the Latin races. Save in Mexico and southward it Is now under the control of English-speaking men. The change goes back for its beginning 300 years.
 Spain had the right of way on these shores for a round century. In the great epoch of discovery at the close Of the sixteenth century the Pope divided between Portugal and Spain, the great exploring nations, all that they should find. The line of demarca- tion between their domains was to be a meridian somewhere between the forty-first and forty fourth degrees west longitude. It was supposed that this would give all the Americas to Spain. As matter of fact the line cut South America so as to give Brazil to Portugal. This was fortunate. as she Portugese discovered and claimed Brazil at any rate. But everything else American fell to Spain, then at the height of her power. It would have seemed safe to predict that the new empire must be Spanish. But north of Mexico Spain never settled with profit or permanence. The whole Atlantic coast was despised by her ad- venturers, because they found no gold and no easy wealth in it's broad extent. Before the close of the seventeenth cen- tury Spain had fallen from her height, Holland successfully resisted her, France rivaled her, England forever humbled her. Her paper claim to North America was never admitted or enforced in the region where the coz trolling settlements were to be.
 Other nations of enterprise and power had to take up the abandoned oppor- tunity. The Dutch and the Swedes made attempts at winning dominion here. During the period when pilgrim and puritan were settling New Eng land the Dutch colonized the New Netherlands, claiming from the Con- necticut to the Delaware. But the commercial rivalry of England and Holland forced a conflict and in l644 the New Netherlands became New York. The Dutch have left their honorable impress on American history and society. but no part of the empire was to be theirs. Even less successful were the Swedes, whom Gustavus Adolphus, their mightiest monarch. hoped to establish in the new world. Their territory in Delaware. occupied by them in 1888. was forcibly seized by Al s,.f t1 Rof Az English nine years later and to become part of Penn's grant in 1881. By the end of the seventeenth century there were but three claimants for North American territory, the Spanish. the French and the English. And for a time there seemed to be room for all.
 The eighteenth century, however, saw the expulsion of France from her do- main on this continent. The Spanish were left as a negligible quantity. A dozen years before the revolutionary war began 1t had been decided that the great power in eastern America was to be English and. moreover, that the dominant power must be not1only superior, but alone There could not be division of territory between the Latin and the Teutonic people. One or the other. as a governing power. must go. The French went. Why and how?
 The causes of the contest and of the victory are readily discerned. Promi- nent, of course, as creating friction be- tween the two peoples was the bitter contest for commercial supremacy going on between France and England. Throughout that century they were again and again at war. The colonies were necessarily involved. The strug- gle between the two peoples in this country had it's economic causes here