AS I grow older the advantages of having been born an American of British and French blood become daily more and more ideal. I now know that I have escaped the insulating influences and the national prejudices of all three countries, and have retained only their qualities—chiefly good. I have been poised, as it were, high over the Atlantic Ocean, from which exalted vantage point my eye could encompass, in its wide sweep, Penn's tower in Philadelphia, Wren's cathedral in London, and the church of Notre-Dame in Paris.
My father's liberal spirit provided against the possibility of any such Americanism as conceives Virginia to be a Garden of Eden and George and Martha Washington a sort of political Adam and Eve. Although, in some ways, I owe England so much, I cherish fondly a kind of super-liberty of thought which I could have derived from no other soil than that of America. America, populous and powerful as she has suddenly become, still retains the instincts and the virtues of a small and primitive society. In the beginning of her history three forces for good operated as incentives to right thought and action—Puritanism, Quakerism, and Republicanism.
By the latter word neither a form of government nor a political party is meant, but simply the public good, morally, socially, and politically.
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