Page:The North Carolina Historical Review - Volume 1, Number 1.pdf/12

10 As for these remarkable people, one must know what were their origins, their religious convictions, their ideals, and their modes of life. One must know what their standards were as regards habitations, food, recreation, and the things that make for the dignity of the individual and the integrity of the family.

I have always believed in the value of the intensive study of American States and communities, but never so much as during the past year. As it happens, I have been reading with fresh interest many contemporary records of early American life, as observed both by American residents and by European visitors. Not a few of these narratives of early observers include notes on this State of North Carolina. One gains fresh confidence and renewed enthusiasm as he reads the story of the pioneers and their valiant encounters with almost insuperable difficulties. He follows the thin and straggling—but very definite—lines of colonization from England, then from Scotland and the North of Ireland, or from Moravia by way of Pennsylvania. He feels the significance of the founding of a state—the addition of another organized sovereignty to that comparatively short list of Civilized States that, taken together in their onward movement, constitute the swelling stream of modern history.

Again let me remark that, except for the British dominions—Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and so on—there are no other great, civilized communities whose history can be studied and regarded in detailed completeness. From the political standpoint, the most important thing to keep in mind is that our commonwealths were, as a working, everyday fact, established upon what in Europe was merely a speculative and untried theory of equality and democracy. We have said this so often—we have used the word democracy so lightly—that we are in danger of regarding it as a mere commonplace.

Yet American democracy is the most significant and far reaching fact of modern times; and the example of our American States is slowly but surely reacting upon the rest of the world and transforming it.

We have made many mistakes in our imperfect experiments in democracy, but we awake from our dreams to find, happily, that these mistakes are for our discipline, and not for our ultimate discomfiture. They are to be remedied all the more surely