garden, and to afford a haven of refuge to the
oppressed and impoverished who poured in from all lands; and this idea
was strengthened by the great number of immigrants who were driven to
the New World by the failure of the successive European revolutions of
the nineteenth century, and by the oppressive tyranny of the Habsburg
monarchy and the Russian despots.

This attitude of aloofness from, and contempt, or, at the best,
indifference, to the Old World was further encouraged by the
traditional treatment of American history. The outstanding event of
that story was, of course, the breach with Britain, with which the
independent existence of the Republic began, and which constituted also
almost its only direct contact with the politics of the Old World. The
view of this conflict which was driven into the national mind by the
school-books, by the annual celebrations of the Fourth of July, and by
incessant newspaper writing, represented the great quarrel not as a
dispute in a family of free communities, in which a new and very
difficult problem was raised, and in which there were faults on both
sides, but as one in which all the right was on one side, as a heroic
resistance of free men against malevolent tyranny. This view has been
profoundly modified by the work of American historians, whose
researches during the last generation have transformed the treatment of
the American Revolution. To-day the old one-sided view finds
expression, in books of serious pretensions, only in England; and it is
to American scholars that we must have recourse for a more scientific
and impartial treatment. But the new and saner view has scarcely yet
made its way into the school-books and the newspapers. If Britain, the
mother of political liberty in the modern world, the land from which
these freemen had inherited their own liberties and the spirit which
made them insist upon their enlargement, was made to appear a tyrant
power, how could it be expected that the mass of Americans, unversed in
world-politics, should follow with sympathy the progress of liberty
beyond the limits of their own republic? It was in the light of this
traditional attitude that the bulk of Americans regarded not only the
wars and controversies of Europe, but the vast process of European
expansion. All these things did not appear to concern them; they seemed
to be caused by motives and ideas which the great republic had
outgrown, though, as we have already seen, and sh