Motherland

“ However fate may cast our lot, A land, a fatherland, we’ve got. Will there a thing on earth appear More worthy, to hold dear? 8.
And here’s, and here’s this fatherland, Here every eye it sees; And we can stretch a pointing hand, To show, with joy, its sea and strand, And say, “Behold this country, this, Our Fatherland it is.” ”

“ The notion of mother country is mistaken or obliterated, owing to our political disturbances. The conception of mother country is so intimately associated with that of [Pg 91] political disorders, and with the afflictions and distrust which they engender, that it is not unusual to hear from one of our countrymen what could not be heard from a native of any other country: "I wish I had been born somewhere else." ”

“ The word "country," in the sense we attach to it in Europe, does not exist for the North American. He is not, like our rustics, attached, from father to son, to the soil which has been the cradle of his family. ”

“ The parent country, with undeviating prudence and virtue, attentive to the first principles of colonization, drew to herself the benefits she might reasonably expect, and preserved to her children the blessings, on which those benefits were founded. ”

“ She teems with such bounty to her adopted children that it has often seemed to me a misnomer to call our country "Father-land,"—Mother-land she is for the whole earth, with her broad lap of plenty sloping from the Rocky Mountains down to the very Atlantic shore, as if inviting the hungry nations to come over and be fed. ”

“ But the years peopled the shores with sturdy colonists, who pushed their way, although held down by difficulties of transport, by distance from other settlements, by wars of race and by mutual jealousies. Now we see a land whose natural loveliness and fertility is turned to the best account, connected with all the life of Europe and America by countless channels of communication, and using the arts of modern civilisation to make the utmost of its political and geographical position. ”

“ I leave this country with a deep impression that my visit to America will be productive of permanent benefit to the Indian tribes, to the negro race, and to the whole population of the Western Continent, North and South, and to Europe. ”

“ She is the natural colonizer of the world. In the short space of three centuries, America, sprung from her loins, has become a giant offspring, a new era in the history of the human race, a new birth whose future must be overwhelming. ”

“ But after all what was in men’s minds, when the American colonies began their contest for The analogy of family life in the case of a mother country and its colonies. independence was, speaking broadly, the feeling, right or wrong, that a mother country ought to pay and colonies ought not. Men argued then, and they still argue, from the analogy of a family. The head of the family should provide, as long as the children remain part of the household. ”

“ The old colonies having ripened into maturity, formed a distinct and separate family, in the great community of mankind. You are now a nation of yourselves, and your attachment to England, is of course subordinate to that of your own country ”

“ Along the western frontier of the colonies that were so soon to be the United States, on the slopes of the wooded mountains, and in the long, trough-like valleys that lay between the ranges, dwelt a peculiar and characteristically American people. ”

“ In this sense, when a country which has sent out colonies is termed the mother country, the expression is analogical, signifying that the colonies of a country stand in the same relation to her in which children stand to their parents. ”

“ They do not only speak of the scenery of the country, which attracts so many, but of the way in which the homeliness of the Mother Country has been reproduced: "It is England all over again! cottages, gardens, country houses, plantations, orchards, tennis lawns and pleasaunces, such as one never expected in a country only occupied a few years ago." ”

“ The rapid settlement of the country, the improvement in civilization, which has come through the multiplication of large villages and of cities, the general facilities for obtaining education, such as exist in no other country, have{248} made ours the land above all others in which generations may rise rapidly from the social position of their ancestors. ”

“ One of the ablest of recent historians begins his opening volume with the declaration that England is not the fatherland of the English-speaking people, but the ancient home, the real fatherland of our race, is the ancient forests of Germany. ”

“ The settlers in the United States brought with them many of their old-world customs and some of these early customs relating to land seem to us now most curious. Society has ever been influenced by the manner of holding, transferring, and inheriting land, and this all the more in a new country and especially where greatly influenced by customs and laws transferred from other countries. ”

“ The present relation between the mother country and her self-governed colonies is partly that of parent and children who have grown to maturity and are taking care of themselves, partly of independent nations in friendly alliance, partly as common subjects of the same sovereign, whose authority is exercised in each by ministers of its own. ”

“ Supposing, therefore, that the order of nature in establishing the relation between parents and children, ought to have been the rule of our conduct to the Colonies, we should have been gradually relaxing our authority as they grew up. ”

“ It surpasses all the rest in the fertility of the soil, and the industry of the colonists. They have given this adopted mother the name of their old country, which they still love, though it has treated them so hardly. ”

“ If we trace the nations of Europe from their former state of barbarism to their present moral elevation, we shall find the same causes to have always operated. The first step has always been the acquisition of permanent habitations, and the consequent love of country and of home. Domestic comforts warmed into life the social virtues. ”

“ Thus, on the lowest ground of a wholly selfish feeling, the approach to nay native shore could not be otherwise than delightful; but viewed as the mother-land, as the great emporium of commerce, the chief temple of liberty, the nurse of military prowess, the unconquered champion of all that is nationally great throughout the world, the sight of our free and happy isle is indeed an inspiring one to those who can appreciate moral grandeur. ”

“ The natives, or natural-born citizens, are those born in the country of parents who are citizens. As the society cannot exist and perpetuate itself otherwise than by the children of the citizens, those children naturally follow the condition of their fathers, and succeed to all their rights. ”

“ Not only did parents strive for the education of their children, but the colonies assisted by commanding the building and maintaining of a school in each town where there was a sufficient number of families and scholars. ”

“ The children obtain situations in the families of the wealthy colonists, still remaining in connection with the mother-school which sent them out; and their letters to the teachers and their friends, about the country and the people of that new world to which they have removed, diffuse the utmost pleasure and excite the deepest interest in the old home. ”

“ The fortunes of the West are guided by emigrants and the descendants of emigrants from New England, the Middle and the border States, and while adopted citizens, nearly all of a desirable class, are in a majority in many parts of the West, most of the western men and women also, of national fame, can trace an American pedigree for several generations. ”

“ A third says it is not fair to count the children of foreign-born parents as foreign; that they are in fact much stronger Americans in general than the native children of native parentage; and instances the flag-drills in the schools, in which the foreign children take the keenest delight, as they do in the study of American history. ”

“ There is, indeed, diffused through the world, the race of British breed, settling and colonizing in some lands, ruling and trading in others, and held together by kinship and correspondence and newspapers and literature and societies and sports and temperament. ”

“ At present nearly all here are Colonists, transplanted, but their affections deeply rooted in the old Home life they have left. In a few years their children will be Colonials, loyal, no doubt, to the idea of their old Mother Country, and to some extent interested in what they hear or read about it. ”

“ On the western frontier lay vast and fertile vacant spaces; for the Americans had barely passed the threshold of the continent predestined to be the inheritance of their children and children's children. ”

“ England, through the agency of private companies and the efforts of individuals, colonized this part of North America by industrious individuals, making their own way in the wilderness, defending themselves against the savages, recognizing their right to the soil, and with a general honest purpose of introducing knowledge as well as Christianity among them. ”

“ The Immigrant Problem.—An increasing proportion of the city's population is foreign born or of foreign parentage. For a hundred years America has been the goal of the European peasant's ambition, the magnet that has drawn him from interior hamlet and ocean port. ”

“ And I half shivered with an indefinite fear that I might be compelled, in spite of all wish and prejudice, and birthright—I, the child of proud old colonial grandees of the South; he, the [Pg 146] son of a mountain farmer, who had married a mate of his own degree, and had kept a mountain inn till fortune found him and death took her. My father at least was the child of those proud old colonials, and I had lived with his people and been reared on their traditions. ”

“ In nineteen of the northern states of our Republic the number of the foreign-born and their immediate descendants exceeds the number of the native-born. In the largest cities the number is two thirds, and even three quarters. ”

“ That is to say, the proportion of the foreign-born in great cities is four times as great, and the proportion of the children of foreign parents is three and one-third times as great as that of the colonial and older native stock. ”

“ In their relations with their children, we find some of the highest traits in the character of the natives. Both parents were, as a rule, excessively fond of their offspring, and boys and girls were carefully instructed. ”

“ Our abundant room—our broad National homestead—is our ample resource. Were our territory as limited as are the British Isles, very certainly our population could not expand as stated. Instead of receiving the foreign born, as now, we should be compelled to send part of the Native-born away. ”

“ and that England, an old and exhausted island, must one day be contented, like other parents, to be strong only in her children. ”

“ Thousands of industrious natives would gladly settle round it, and engage in that peaceful pursuit of agriculture and trade of which they are so fond, and, undistracted by wars and rumors of wars, might listen to the purifying and ennobling truths of the gospel of Jesus Christ. ”

“ Emigrants, going to settle at the West, with their families, would do well to take their beds, bedding, a moderate supply of culinary utensils, the most essential of their farming tools, and a good supply of clothing. ”

“ England is a domestic country. Here the home is revered and the hearth is sacred. The nation is represented by a family — the Royal Family; and if that family is educated with a sense of responsibility and a sentiment of public duty, it is difficult to exaggerate the salutary influence they may exercise over a nation. ”

“ It has often given me pleasure to observe, that Independent America was not composed of detached and distant territories, but that one connected, fertile, wide-spreading country was the portion of our western sons of liberty. Providence has in a particular manner blessed it with a variety of soils and productions, and watered it with innumerable streams, for the delight and accommodation of its inhabitants. A succession of navigable waters forms a kind of chain round its borders, as if to bind it together; ”

“ Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development. ”

“ Let our object be, OUR COUNTRY, OUR WHOLE COUNTRY, AND NOTHING BUT OUR COUNTRY. And, by the blessing of God, may that country itself become a vast and splendid monument, not of oppression and terror, but of Wisdom, of Peace, and of Liberty, upon which the world may gaze with admiration for ever! ”

“ Is it what you call civilisation that makes England flourish? Is it the universal development of the faculties of man that has rendered an island, almost unknown to the ancients, the arbiter of the world? Clearly not. It is her inhabitants that have done this; it is an affair of race. ”

“ New planted Colonies are generally attended with a Force and Necessity of Planting the known and approved Staple and Product of the Country, as well as all the Provisions their Families spend. ”

“ The heart of the People, North and South, is for the Union. ”

“ In fact, the history of North America has been perhaps more profoundly influenced by man's inheritance from his past homes than by the physical features of his present home. ”