the country from the first plantations in America." "I have
always laughed," he declared in an earlier letter, "at the
affectation of representing American independence as a novel
idea, as a modern discovery, as a late invention. The idea of it
as a possible thing, as a probable event, nay as a necessary and
unavoidable measure, in case Great Britain should assume an
unconstitutional authority over us, has been familiar to
Americans from the first settlement of the country."

There is, then, a predisposition, a latent or potential
Americanism which existed long before the United States came into
being. Now that our political unity has become a fact, the
predisposition is certain to be regarded by our own and by future
generations as evidence of a state of mind which made our
separate national life inevitable. Yet to Thomas Hutchinson, a
sound historian and honest man, the last Royal Governor of
Massachusetts, a separate national life seemed in 1770 an
unspeakable error and calamity.

The seventeenth-century colonists were predominantly English, in
blood, in traditions, and in impulses. Whether we look at
Virginia or Plymouth or at the other colonies that were planted
in swift succession along the seaboard, it is clear that we are
dealing primarily with men of the English race. Most of them
would have declared, with as much emphasis as Francis Hopkinson a
century later, "We of America are in all respects Englishmen."
Professor Edward Channing thinks that it took a century of
exposure to colonial conditions to force the English in America
away from the traditions and ideals of those who continued to
live in the old land. But the student of literature must keep