Memories of Europe's forges and trees, or
fields of roses and golden mountains, and even of Asia's wildernesses, are
in the names of many who enter those doors; the memories of other
languages are in the muscles of their tongues or the formation of their
organs of speech. Like the ancient Ephraimites at the fords of Jordan,
they cannot "frame to pronounce" certain words. And memories of
persecution or of vassalage are in the physical and mental attitudes of
some. But they are all reborn of a genealogy impersonal but loftier in its
gifts than any mere personal heritage--a genealogy which, like that of the
children of Deucalion, begins in the earth itself, the free soil.
I have often thought and spoken of how artificial differences disappear
when, let us say, Smith (English) and Schmidt (German) and Cohen (Hebrew),
Coletti (Italian) and D'Artagnan (French) and McGregor (Scotch) and Olsen
(Scandinavian) and McCarthy (Irish) and Winslow (of old America) travel
together through the parasangs of the "Anabasis," or together follow
Caesar into Gaul, or together compute a solar parallax, or build an arch,
or do any one of a thousand things that have no national boundaries or
racial characteristics.
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