Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 7.djvu/756

724 National character in England and America, [isoo- very little. The country which to-day absorbs and buries the divers nationalities of .Europe is essentially the same which, in the reign of King George III, declared its independence of England. The typical American of 1900 is, on the whole, more like his ancestor of 1775 than is the typical Englishman. For this an adequate reason may easily be found. On the whole, the conditions of American life have altered less, in the last century and a quarter, than the conditions of English life ; and it is as true of nations as it is of human beings or any other organisms that, if the conditions surrounding them remain stable, their chief characteristics will not be prone to radical change. Accordingly, we find ourselves, in our search for the origin of American nationality, carried back to a point before that nationality declared itself politically independent. The new race, which, despite itself, has at last attained imperial power, is the same English-speaking race which, four or five generations ago, broke the bonds that held it to the mother-country. In 1775, no doubt, the American colonies were already of somewhat mixed blood ; yet the great stream of immigration, which has been assumed to be the chief source of the difference between Americans and Englishmen, did not begin to flow till more than two generations after that date. It is hardly excessive to say that the Americans of 1775 were, in the main, as English in their traditions and their temper as they were in their language. It follows that, to this day, the nationality of America, for all its various foreign infusion, may be regarded as a variety of the English. Our question accordingly grows more definite, reducing itself to an inquiry concerning the difference which existed at the time of the Revolution, between native Englishmen and their fellow-subjects across the Atlantic. The most familiar analysis of American character at the time of the Revolution is that given by Burke, in his speech on conciliation with America. Without attempting to summarise it, we may agree that it depicts a kind of Englishman specifically, though not generically, different from the kind which had remained at home. A little later, Francis Hopkinson, an accomplished lawyer of Philadelphia, set forth, in a paper familiar to all students of American history, the view of English character which was most obvious to the kind of American whom Burke so vividly sketched. In brief, Hopkinson found Englishmen densely conservative, just as Burke found Americans passionately devoted to the spirit of liberty. The two peoples were of common stock ; but their tempers had come to differ, and each was growing aware of it. Our question becomes more definite still. When and how did this difference begin ? A few lines from Hopkinson may suggest the answer, or at least the direction in which the answer is to be sought. " A manufacturer," he writes, in discussing English character, "has been brought up a maker of pin-heads ; he has been at this business forty years and, of course, makes pin-heads with great dexterity ; but he cannot make a whole pin for his