Page:The North Carolina Historical Review - Volume 1, Number 1.pdf/7

Rh have awakened to find ourselves constituting by far the most powerful and influential nation of the world in this new century. We are confronted with problems that affect our hundred million people as a whole, and with world responsibilities from which we cannot escape. As we face the magnitude of these present and prospective issues, we are obliged to take account of ourselves—to ask what are our real assets and resources—to ask ourselves whether in a time of such great changes we have any elements of stability. And we find our most satisfactory answers in studies that begin at home.

As we look at Russia through the hazes of distance that are rendered the more opaque by reason of our ignorance of a thousand everyday matters, we are apt to think of a vast country, with its scores of millions of peasants, in terms altogether general; as if Russians were all alike and their country a uniform territory as respects climate, products, and modes of life. And in like manner the average peasant in the heart of Russia has certain conceptions of America, into which there does not enter even to a slight extent the thought that the land and the people are other than of uniform texture and character. In point of fact, Russia is a land of almost endless variety, while possessing certain characteristics that are dominant enough to be regarded as relating to Russia as a whole. As a nation, we in America have characteristics that unify us as a nation. We have also our well-marked local variations.

To understand what is common to us as Americans, we are obliged to go back to the main currents of European history. We find all of our original colonies founded and developed principally upon the habits, customs, and experiences of Western Europe, and especially of the British islands. There was enough similarity of origin to make possible the later union of the original colonies up and down the Atlantic seaboard. This union was highly advantageous, although it was due far less to an instinct of affinity, or to a prevailing belief that brethren should dwell together in unity, than to the imminence of common dangers. Whatever the historians may have written, there are few people nowadays who realize how great and constant were the perils from without that forced themselves upon the attention of all our colonies, and that led them step