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quality gave him, came to dominate the other races which invaded or settled in Britain and finally worked his way up to and through the Norman crust which, as it were, overlay the country. In England many institutions are of course Norman. An hereditary aristocracy, the laws of primogeniture and entail--these are Norman. By the help of them the Norman hoped to perpetuate his authority over the Saxon herd; and failed. Magna Charta, Cromwell, the Roundheads, the Puritans, the spirit of nonconformity, most of the limitations of the power of the Throne, the industrial and commercial greatness of Britain--these things are Anglo-Saxon. The American colonists (however many individuals of Norman blood were among them) were Anglo-Saxon; they came from the Anglo-Saxon body of the people and carried with them the Anglo-Saxon spirit. They did not reproduce in their new environment an hereditary aristocracy, a law of primogeniture or of entail. It is probable that no single English colony to-day, if suddenly cut loose from the Empire and left to fashion its form of society anew, would reproduce any one of these things. In the United States the Anglo-Saxon spirit went to work without Norman assistance or (as we choose to view it) Norman encumbrances. The Anglo-Saxon spirit is still working in England--never perhaps has its operation been more powerfully visible than in the trend of thought of the last few years. It is working also in the United States; but, because it there works independently of Norman traditions, it works faster. In many things--in almost everything, as we shall see--the two peoples are progressing along precisely the same path, a path other than that which other nations are treading. In many things--in almost everything--the United States moves the more rapidly. It seems at first a contradiction in terms to say that the Americans are an English people and then to show that in many individual matters the English people is approximating to American models. It is in truth no contradiction; and the explanation is obvious. Both are impelled by the same spirit, the same motives, the same ambitions; but in England that spirit, those motives and ambitions work against greater resistance. What looks at first like a peculiar departure on the part of the American people will again and again, on investigation, be found to be only the English spirit shooting ahead faster than it can advance in England. When, in a particu
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