r of
scarcely more than yesterday. As Goldwin Smith has said, the Revolution of
1776 is to an American what the Norman conquest is to an Englishman--the
event on which to found a claim of ancestral distinction. More than seven
hundred years divide these two events. With the Revolution, our history as
a nation began; before that we were a group of colonies, each a part of
the British Empire. We fought single-handed with Indians, it is true, and
we cooperated with the mother country in wresting the continent from the
French, but all this history, in a technical sense, is English history
rather than the history of the United States.

Our Revolution occurred in the reign of the Third George; back of it runs
a line of other Hanoverian kings, of Stuart kings, of Tudor kings, of
Plantagenet kings, of Norman kings, of Saxon kings, of Roman governors, of
Briton kings and queens, of Scottish tribal heads and kings, of ancient
Irish kings. Long before Caesar landed in Kent, inhabitants of England had
erected forts, constructed war chariots, and reared temples of worship, of
which a notable example still survives on Salisbury Plain. So had the
Picts and Scots of Caledonia reared strongholds and used war chariots, and
so had Celts erected temples of worship in Ireland, and Phoenicians had
mined tin in Cornwall. When Cavaliers were founding a commonwealth at
Jamestown and the Puritans one on Massachusetts Bay, the British Isles
were six hundred years away from the Norman conquest, the Reformation of
the English church had been effected, Chaucer had written his "Tales,"
Bacon his "Essays," and Shakespeare all but a few of his "Plays."

Of the many races to whom belong these storied annals--Briton, Pict, Scot,
Saxon, Dane, Celt, Norman--we of America, whose ancestral lines run back
to those islands, are the far-descended children, heirs actual. Our
history, as a civilized people, began not in Independence Hall,
Philadelphia, not at Jamestown, not at Plymouth Rock, but there in the
northeastern Atlantic, in lands now acknowledging the sway of the
Parliament of Westminster, and where, as with us, the speech of all is
English. Not alone do we share that speech with them, but that matchless
literature, also English, and more than that, racial customs, laws and
manners, of which many are as old as the Norman conquest, while others,
for aught we know, are survivals from an age when human sacrifices were
made around the monoliths of Stoneheng