great city of today.
England had to wrest from the Dutch their ascendancy in New
Netherland, where they split in twain the great English colonies of
New England and of the South and controlled the magnificent harbor at
the mouth of the Hudson, which has since become the water gate of the
nation.

While the English were thus engaged in establishing themselves on the
coast, the French girt them in by a strategic circle of forts and
trading posts reaching from Acadia, up the St. Lawrence, around the
Great Lakes, and down the valley of the Mississippi, with outposts on
the Ohio and other important confluents. When, after the final
struggle between France and Britain for world empire, France retired
from the North American continent, she left to England all her
possessions east of the Mississippi, with the exception of a few
insignificant islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the West Indies;
and to Spain she ceded New Orleans and her vast claims beyond the
great river.

Thus from the first, the lure of the New World beckoned to many races,
and to every condition of men. By the time that England's dominion
spread over half the northern continent, her colonies were no longer
merely English. They were the most cosmopolitan areas in the world. A
few European cities had at times been cities of refuge, but New York
and Philadelphia were more than mere temporary shelters to every
creed. Nowhere else could so many tongues be heard as in a stroll
down Broadway to the Battery. No European commonwealths embraced in
their citizenry one-half the ethnic diversity of the Carolinas or of
Pennsylvania. And within the wide range of his American domains, the
English King could point to one spot or another and say: "Here the
Spaniards have built a chaste and beautiful mission; here the French
have founded a noble city; here my stubborn Roundheads have planted a
whole nest of commonwealths; here my Dutch neighbors thought they
stole a march on me, but I forestalled them; this valley is filled
with Germans, and that plateau is covered with Scotch-Irish, while the
Swedes have taken possession of all this region." And with a proud
gesture he could add, "But everywhere they read their laws in the
King's English and acknowledge my sovereignty."

Against the shifting background of history these many races of diverse
origin played their individual parts, each contributing its essential
characteristics to the growing complex of a new order of soc