[Footnote 2:  John Fiske:  The Dutch and Quaker Colonies in America, vol.  II, p. 351.]

CHAPTER II

THE AMERICAN STOCK

In the history of a word we may frequently find a fragment, sometimes a large section, of universal history.  This is exemplified in the term American, a name which, in the phrase of George Washington, “must always exalt the pride of patriotism” and which today is proudly borne by a hundred million people.  There is no obscurity about the origin of the name America.  It was suggested for the New World in 1507 by Martin Waldseemueller, a German geographer at the French college of Saint-Die.  In that year this savant printed a tract, with a map of the world or mappemonde, recognizing the dubious claims of discovery set up by Amerigo Vespucci and naming the new continent after him.  At first applied only to South America, the name was afterwards extended to mean the northern continent as well; and in time the whole New World, from the Frozen Ocean to the Land of Fire, came to be called America.

Inevitably the people who achieved a preponderating influence in the new continent came to be called Americans.  Today the name American everywhere signifies belonging to the United States, and a citizen of that country is called an American.  This unquestionably is geographically anomalous, for the neighbors of the United States, both north and south, may claim an equal share in the term.  Ethnically, the only real Americans are the Indian descendants of the aboriginal races.  But it is futile to combat universal usage:  the World War has clinched the name upon the inhabitants of the United States.  The American army, the American navy, American physicians and nurses, American food and clothing—­these are phrases with a definite geographical and ethnic meaning which neither academic ingenuity nor race rivalry can erase from the memory of mankind.

This chapter, however, is to discuss the American stock, and it is necessary to look farther back than mere citizenship; for there are millions of American citizens of foreign birth or parentage who, though they are Americans, are clearly not of any American stock.

At the time of the Revolution there was a definite American population, knit together by over two centuries of toil in the hard school of frontier life, inspired by common political purposes, speaking one language, worshiping one God in divers manners, acknowledging one sovereignty, and complying with the mandates of one common law.  Through their common experience in subduing the wilderness and in wresting their independence from an obstinate and stupid monarch, the English colonies became a nation.  Though they did not fulfill Raleigh’s hope and become an English nation, they were much more English than non-English, and these Revolutionary Americans may be called today, without abuse of the term, the original American stock.  Though they were a blend of various races, a cosmopolitan admixture of ethnic strains, they were not more varied than the original admixture of blood now called English.