This valley she held in the title of her own claim for more than a century
from the time that her explorers first looked over its brim, held it by
valors and sufferings which would have been gloriously recorded if their
issue had been to keep by those waters the tongue in which they could be
written and sung.
When France did yield it, because of forces outside the valley, not inside
(there was hardly a sound of battle there), she gave it in effect to a new
nation. She shared it with the aboriginal American, she gave it to the
ultimate American. She got her title from the first Americans who, as
Chateaubriand said, called themselves the "Children of Always." She gave
it to those who are beginning to think of it as belonging not to them but
to the new "Children of Always."
By her very valorous holding she taught the fringe of colonies along the
Atlantic the first lessons in union, and she gave them a leader out of the
disciplines of her borders, George Washington, whom in the course of time
she directly assisted with her sympathy and means to make certain the
independence of those same colonies.
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