Page:The North Carolina Historical Review - Volume 1, Number 1.pdf/8

6 by step to the compromises and agreements that resulted in our present blending as a nation

But the individual states persisted; and each of them was making its own history, even while all were contributing to the partnership that was maintained at first for certain common purposes, and afterwards because nationality had become a thing actually achieved, not through compacts but through experiences. Political relationships with the mother country through nearly two centuries of tutelage had brought into being our original group of States. In like manner, the Union of these earlier States became the mother country that brought into political existence additional entities, that were destined in due time to make their own histories, as sovereign members of the sisterhood of commonwealths.

I know of nothing in the political history of ancient or modern times that is so thrilling or so romantic as the great epic of the making of these individual States, all the way from our eastern seaboard to the Pacific coast. The founding of our original settlements in the seventeenth century had been so adventurous and so heroic as to enhance the world's respect for human nature as such. Democracy, both in theory and in practice, was bound to result from such struggles to found permanent communities in a new world. It is not strange that the spirit awakened by such an effort should have impelled the descendants of the early colonists to continue the struggle with the wilderness, and to push their way to the great inner valleys and still beyond. It was this continuous movement of entire families, or of younger members of families, swarming from the older to the newer zones of settlement, that made the American people as a whole what we now find it.

Except in the smallest way, nothing of this kind has happened in the development of any other country. The Norman system of overlordship was super-imposed in England, but did not displace the earlier Saxon and Celtic populations. There had been vast tribal migrations in Europe during and following the last phases of the Roman Empire; and many continuing results are to be found in localities. But for the most part the blending of Slav and Teuton as in the eastern parts of Germany, and of older stocks with Goths and Vandals, as in parts