T CHAPTER XV NEW FORCES AND NEW TASKS tunity HE first steps toward union, freedom, and democ- America racy had been taken, as we have seen, long spells before America was settled or even discovered. opporProgress along all these lines continued in Europe. Nevertheless the struggle for liberty in the Old World was hard and often discouraging. Beginning with the Pilgrims who came in the Mayflower to Plymouth in 1620, multitudes from all the countries of Europe came to America to find here a land of freedom, a land of opportunity. Sometimes it was religious freedom that they sought. This was the case with many of the first emigrants from England in the years 1620-40. Sometimes it was the opportunity to have land and homes of their own, with greater opportunity to work out their own lives. This seems to have brought many of the Scotch-Irish a century later. Sometimes it was political liberty that was most prominent, as with the Germans who came in 1848. Frequently it has been several motives combined. In the Old World the power of kings and nobility was tenacious; the division between gentry and common folk was firmly fixed and only rarely could a man of lower class break over this division. The land was nearly all owned by the gentry. Laws often favored the ruling class. Religion was controlled in many ways by the government. In England, after the time of Henry VIII, the king was head of the church. At the time when the early settlers Four factors in American life began to come to this country religious persecution was not uncommon. Edward Everett Hale in his poem on Columbus represents him as hearing a voice calling for a chance to make a new beginning: This which you use is black and rough with smears When all God's children had forgot their birth, And drudged and fought and died like beasts of earth. "Give me white paper!' One storm-trained seaman listened to the word; What no man saw he saw; he heard what no man heard. In answer he compelled the sea To eager men to tell The secret she had kept so well! Left blood and guilt and tyranny behind, Sailing still West the hidden shore to find; For all mankind that unstained scroll unfurled, Where God might write anew the story of the World." We purpose in this chapter to note briefly the new conditions that have made life in America in many ways freer and more democratic than life in the Old World. In later chapters we shall take up in succession what we may call the spirit of America and its contribution to human life. The four great aspects of this spirit and contribution are (1) Liberty, (2) Union, (3) Democracy, and (4) Free coöperation with other nations. The great facts which we notice in this chapter are (1) the kind or class of people who came to America, (2) the influence of free land, (3) the influence of the frontier, (4) the influence in more recent years of the Industrial Revolution. This last is not peculiar to America, but must be noticed in order to understand the recent problems of America. America? During the three hundred years since America was Who came first settled by white men many sorts of people have to come to its shores, but for our purpose the character of those who came first is particularly important because they did much to shape the institutions of the country, its government, its schools, its religion, its mode of life. Those who came later came very largely because they liked what these first settlers had done, and in most respects the later comers fitted into the system which they found when they arrived, although in some respects they certainly modified it, notably in such matters as the observance of Sunday. The early settlers were for the most part of the middle or lower class. This was particularly true in New England. There were, to be sure, a few landholders and gentry among the Massachusetts Bay Colony, but the great majority were not of this class. None of the nobility came to these colonies. Farther south there were in the Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina colonies members of the gentry. The Dutch also had some large estates, but with the exception of the coast region in the south the country came to be peopled more and more by those who were not well off in the Old World and sought a place here to better their fortunes. The great landholders of Europe, the lords who were already in conditions of power, of wealth, had nothing to gain by coming here. They naturally stayed at home. We are not to think that people of the middle and lower classes were necessarily entirely different in their bodies and minds from people of the nobility. Free land The fact is, however, as we have seen in earlier chapters, that when a conquering band of warriors invade a country they tend to make a distinct class and to reduce the other dwellers to a lower class. Then the children of the first class are brought up to look upon themselves as superior to others. They are constantly reminded of this distinction by their whole training and education. They follow a different kind of occupation. They are either rulers or in the army or in the professions. They do not engage in manual labor. They own practically all the land and get their support largely through this ownership, while the others carry on farming and trading. The son of the farmer or trader expects to be a farmer or trader. He is educated for this. Hence, although the children of the two classes may not be so different at birth, they come to be increasingly different as they grow up. In America, although a few of the gentry came over, and although in certain parts of the country they kept a certain amount of class feeling and class pride, they for the most part did not have any such complete control of land or government as to make a subject-class out of the rest of the people. So many of the other classes came and were enabled because of free land and the influence of the frontier to become prominent in all departments of life that the mixing in all kinds of ways soon began. All settlers went to the same church, to the same town meetings, families intermarried, and in course of time, when common schools were established, children went to the same school. In the Old World property in land was almost always originally gained by what has been called the divine right of grab. The Celts seized upon the land of Britain and largely took it away from the previous dwellers. The Saxons drove off the Celts or made them laborers on the land. The Normans in turn claimed all the land of England by conquest. The Saxons were mostly reduced to the condition of villeins, who had certain rights as tenants but did not own the land they worked upon. The land in Great Britain has ever since been largely owned by the few rather than by the many. One of the most important features in the New World was that practically every colonist who settled in America either owned land from the beginning or soon came to own it. Today nearly half the population in the United States live in cities or large villages. But this is a recent condition which is setting new problems for democracy. In all the earlier years when America was shaping its ideas and its government, the people lived largely under rural conditions. The colonists were very largely farmers, and those who were not farmers usually owned at least their own homes. A group of settlers in a town near the coast would live there until their sons grew up and wished to set up their own homes. Then they would petition the authorities of the colony to survey a new tract and open it to settlers, so that the sons could own farms and homes. After the Revolution the public lands in the Middle West, and later the great tracts of prairie and upland still farther West, were open to settlers. Almost any one who was willing to work and to endure the hardships of the pioneer could own a homestead. It required persistence and courage; it meant going without many comforts of civilization; it meant loneliness, and often danger. Many city dwellers of today would prefer to rent a steam-heated, electric-lighted |