, and scientific endeavor, was there in
the colonies when the hour of self-examination came? Only the briefest
summary may be attempted here. As to race, these men of the third and
fourth generation since the planting of the colonies were by no means
so purely English as the first settlers. The 1,600,000 colonists in
1760 were mingled of many stocks, the largest non-English elements being
German and Scotch-Irish--that is, Scotch who had settled for a while in
Ulster before emigrating to America. "About one-third of the colonists
in 1760," says Professor Channing, "were born outside of America."
Crevecoeur's "Letters from an American Farmer" thus defined the
Americans: "They are a mixture of English, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch,
Germans, and Swedes. From this promiscuous breed that race now called
Americans has arisen." The Atlantic seaboard, with a narrow strip
inland, was fairly well covered by local communities, differing in
blood, in religion, in political organization--a congeries of separate
experiments or young utopias, waiting for that most utopian experiment
of all, a federal union. But the dominant language of the "promiscuous
breed" was English, and in the few real centers of intellectual life the
English tradition was almost absolute.

The merest glance at colonial journalism will confirm this estimate. The
"Boston News-Letter," begun in 1704, was the first of the journals, if
we omit the single issue of "Publick Occurrences" in the same town in
1690. By 1765 there were nearly fifty colonial newspapers and several
magazines. Their influence made for union, in Franklin's sense of that
word, and their literary models, like their paper, type, and even ink,
were found in London. The "New England Courant," established in Boston
in 1721 by James Franklin, is full of imitations of the "Tatler,"
"Spectator," and "Guardian." What is more, the "Courant" boasted of
its office collection of books, including Shakespeare, Milton, the
"Spectator," and Swift's "Tale of a Tub." * This was in 1722. If we
remember that no allusion to Shakespeare has been discovered in the
colonial literature of the seventeenth century, and scarcely an allusion
to the Puritan poet Milton, and that the Harvard College Library in 1723
had nothing of Addison, Steele, Bolingbroke, Dryden, Pope, and Swift,
and had only recently obtained copies of Milton and Shakespeare, we
can appreciate the value of James Franklin's apprenticeship in London.
Perhap