Page:The Modern Writer.pdf/21

 For while in our schools and colleges and in our literature the puritan, the New Englander ruled, people were pouring into America from all over western Europe. The cold blood of the men of the North was being mixed constantly with the warmer blood of the South. Italians came. The Greeks and the southern Slavs came in hundreds of thousands. The eager highly temperamental Jews and the imaginative Celts poured in. On the West coast they got the Spaniard and the Mexican, and no man ever, I believe, accused the Spaniard or the Mexican of being puritanic.

The intellectual life of the country was being formed and controlled by English Protestants while the physical American was being built up of a mixture of all of the bloods of the western world and the process is still, I believe, going on. In our political thought the Adamses of New England, with their desire to estab-