ecause of
an overwhelming oppression of body and soul that the Pilgrims
adventured to America. It was not "freedom to worship God" that they
sought. They had that in Holland. They sought freedom to be
themselves, to realize their national genius in their own individual
way. Their English manners, English speech, English history, and
English loyalty were, in fact, more important to them than their
Hebrew Bible. They used that as the spiritual pabulum which nourished
their English corporate life. Their Calvinism was a reinterpretation
of its prophetic nationalism expressed in the doctrine of the "chosen
people"; their political institutions were a modification of the ideal
political order it was supposed to reveal. As Cotton Mather narrates,
his grandfather, John Cotton, found, on his arrival in New England,
that the population was much exercised over the framing of a "civil
constitution." They turned to him for help, begging "that he would,
from the laws wherewith God governed his ancient people, form an
abstract of such as were of a moral and lasting equity." So "he
propounded unto them an endeavor after a theocracy, as near as might
be to that which was the glory of Israel." Out of this beginning the
democratic mood of America surges; in such conceptions the ideals
which express the mood have their origins. These ideals are the
conservation of nationality, and the equality of men before the
inconceivable supremacy of their God. Hebraism and English
nationality--these are the spiritual background of the American
commonwealth.

Political freedom in America has tended to generate self-expression of
each national group, and our country is to-day, broadly speaking, a
great cooeperative commonwealth of nationalities, British, French,
German, Slavic, Jewish, each freely developing, in so far as it is
self-conscious, its national genius, its language, literature and art
in its own characteristic way as its best contribution to the
civilization of America as a whole,[C] realizing in this way the ideal
of the democracy of nationalities, of international comity and
cooeperation which our prophets were the first to formulate.

American nationhood, thus, is in the way of becoming what Swiss
nationhood fully is, the liberator and protector of nationality; its
democracy is its strength, and its democracy is "hyphenation."
"Hyphenation" may, it is true, become perverse. As an expression of
the cooeperation of nationality with natio