on both sides than they are today. Here is a case where ancestry has
perverted history, but simply because there has been an unnatural
segregation of descendants. Let me note another where we have absolutely
forgotten our ancestral predilections and have gone over to the other
side, simply because the other side made the records. When we read a Roman
account of encounters between the legions and the northern tribes, where
do we place ourselves in imagination, as readers? Always with the Roman
legions. But our place is not there; it is with our hardy and brave
forefathers, fighting to defend their country and their firesides against
the southern intruders. How many teachers of history try to utilize
race-consciousness in their pupils to make them attain a clearer knowledge
of what it all meant? Should we not be proud that we are of the blood of
men who withstood the self-styled rulers of the world and won their
freedom and their right to shape their own personal and civic development?

I should like to see a book tracing the history and development of an
imaginary Anglo-Saxon American line of ancestry, taking it from the
forests of Northern Germany across to Britain, through the Norman conquest
and down the stream of subsequent English history across seas to
America--through savage wars and Revolution, perhaps across the
Alleghenies, to settle finally in the great West. I would try to make the
reader realize that here was no fairy tale--no tale of countries and races
with which we have naught to do, but the story of our own fathers, whose
features and whose characteristics, physical and mental, have been
transmitted by heredity to us, their sons and daughters of the year 1913.

It is unfortunate perhaps, for our perceptions of racial continuity, that
we are rovers by disposition. Who runs across the sea, says the Latin
poet, changes his sky but not his mind. True enough, but it is difficult
for some of us to realize it. It is hard for some of us to realize that
our emigrant ancestors were the same men and women when they set foot on
these shores as when they left the other side some weeks before. Our
trans-Atlantic cousins labor under the same difficulties, for they assure
us continually that we are a "new" country. We have, they say, the faults
and the advantages of "youth." It would be interesting to know at just
what point in the passage the education and the habits and the prejudices
of the incoming Englishman dropped