We were for the most part freed from alien interference, and could, so far as we dared, experiment with political and social ideals.  The land was unoccupied, and its settlement offered an unprecedented area and abundance of economic opportunity.  After the Revolution the whole political and social organization was renewed, and made both more serviceable and more flexible.  Under such happy circumstances the New World was assuredly destined to become to its inhabitants a Land of Promise,—­a land in which men were offered a fairer chance and a better future than the best which the Old World could afford.

No more explicit expression has ever been given to the way in which the Land of Promise was first conceived by its children than in the “Letters of an American Farmer.”  This book was written by a French immigrant, Hector St. John de Crevecoeur before the Revolution, and is informed by an intense consciousness of the difference between conditions in the Old and in the New World.  “What, then, is an American, this new man?” asks the Pennsylvanian farmer.  “He is either a European or the descendant of a European; hence the strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country....

“He becomes an American by being received in the broad lap of our great Alma Mater.  Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labors and prosperity will one day cause great changes in the world.  Here the rewards of his industry follow with equal steps the progress of his labor; this labor is founded on the basis of self-interest; can it want a stronger allurement?  Wives and children, who before in vain demanded a morsel of bread, now fat and frolicsome, gladly help their father to clear those fields, whence exuberant crops are to arise to feed them all; without any part being claimed either by a despotic prince, a rich abbot, or a mighty lord....  The American is a new man, who acts upon new principles; he must therefore entertain new ideas and form new opinions.  From involuntary idleness, servile dependence, penury, and useless labor, he has passed to toils of a very different nature rewarded by ample subsistence.  This is an American.”

Although the foregoing is one of the first, it is also one of the most explicit descriptions of the fundamental American; and it deserves to be analyzed with some care.  According to this French convert the American is a man, or the descendant of a man, who has emigrated from Europe chiefly because he expects to be better able in the New World to enjoy the fruits of his own labor.  The conception implies, consequently, an Old World, in which the ordinary man cannot become independent and prosperous, and, on the other hand, a New World in which economic opportunities are much more abundant and accessible.  America has been peopled by Europeans primarily because they expected in that country to make more money more easily.  To the European immigrant—­that is, to the aliens who have been converted into Americans by the advantages of American life—­the Promise of America has consisted largely in the opportunity which it offered of economic independence and prosperity.  Whatever else the better future, of which Europeans anticipate the enjoyment in America, may contain, these converts will consider themselves cheated unless they are in a measure relieved of the curse of poverty.