For those chosen people such, too, seemed her purpose--the Mother went to the
race upon whom she had smiled a benediction for a thousand years--the race
that obstacle but strengthens, that thrives best under an alien effort to
kill, that has ever conquered its conquerors, and that seems bent on the task
of carrying the best ideals any age has ever known back to the Old World from
which it sprang. The Great Mother knows! Knows that her children must suffer,
if they stray too far from her great teeming breasts. And how she has followed
close when this Saxon race--her youngest born--seemed likely to stray too
far--gathering its sons to her arms in virgin lands that they might suckle
again and keep the old blood fresh and strong. Who could know what danger
threatened it when she sent her blue-eyed men and women to people the
wilderness of the New World? To climb the Alleghenies, spread through the
wastes beyond, and plant their kind across a continent from sea to sea. Who
knows what dangers threaten now, when, his task done, she seems to be opening
the eastern gates of the earth with a gesture that seems to say--"Enter,
reclaim, and dwell therein!"

One little race of that race in the New World, and one only, has she kept
flesh of her flesh, bone of her bone--to that race only did she give no
outside aid. She shut it in with gray hill and shining river. She shut it off
from the mother state and the mother nation and left it to fight its own fight
with savage nature, savage beast, and savage man. And thus she gave the little
race strength of heart and body and brain, and taught it to stand together as
she taught each man of the race to stand alone, protect his women, mind his
own business, and meddle not at all; to think his own thoughts and die for
them if need be, though he divided his own house against itself; taught the
man to cleave to one woman, with the penalty of death if he strayed elsewhere;
to keep her-- and even himself--in dark ignorance of the sins against Herself
for which she has slain other nations, and in that happy ignorance keeps them
to-day, even while she is slaying elsewhere still.