Page:Anglo-American relations during the Spanish-American war (IA abz5883.0001.001.umich.edu).pdf/27

Rh minority in England were opposed to the war [Revolution]."

Strong as was the centrifugal force that had been operating for over a century between Great Britain and the United States, it was opposed and gradually counteracted by a centripetal force ever more powerful. In the first place most of the colonists were Anglo-Saxons. To them Great Britain was home. Their self-imposed exile only intensified their feeling of kinship. Just as the individual, deprived of his own home through his own actions, often appreciates for the first time the real significance of that home, so the colonists, frequently critical and hostile toward Great Britain, often maintained within their inner consciousness a profound feeling of kinship.

Sharing the same language, the English literature with its wealth of tradition and history became also the possession of the colonists. It was, indeed, the primal and fundamental bond existing between them. The King James Bible, Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer, Foxe's Lives of the Martyrs, and the old English hymns, together with Milton's Paradise Lost and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress were the treasured and essential volumes in every American library. In fact, it was not until nearly a quarter of the nineteenth century had passed that there can be said that an American literature existed.