There was no north-and-south line then. The men of the valley were all
westerners, "men of the western world"; not yet very strong as
nationalists, that is, as men of the United States. "Men of the western
waters" they also called themselves, for they shunned the uplands and kept
near the streams by which or along which they had come into the wilderness
and from which they drank. Men of the axe they were, too, in that first
occupancy, never venturing far from the trees that gave them both roof and
fuel. It was later, as we have seen, that the men of the plough came where
the men of the axe had cleared the way.
It is interesting to notice that when these builders of new States came to
devise symbols for their official seals, many of them took the plough,
that implement which we know was carried in the first Aryan migration into
the plains of Europe, but some of them put a rising sun on the horizon of
their shields--the sign of the consciousness of a new day.
The foundation, then, of the new societies was laid in what might be
called a concrete of character and lineage--heterogeneous, but all of the
neo-American period and not of the paleo-European.
Pages:
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223