The Socialists, it is true, demand the abolition of private property in land and the nationalizing not only of the soil but of all mines, railways, waterworks, and docks in the kingdom.  Thus far, however, they have shown no disposition to attain their objects by violent action.  England, by nature conservative, is slow to break the bond of historic continuity which connects her present with her past.

“Do you think we shall ever have a second revolution?” the Duke of Wellington was once asked.  “We may,” answered the great general, “but if we do, it will come by act of Parliament.”  That reply probably expresses the general temper of the people, who believe that they can gain by the ballot more than they can by an appeal to force, knowing that theirs is

“A land of settled government,
A land of just and old renown,
Where freedom broadens slowly down,
From precedent to precedent."[2]

[2] Tennyson’s “You Ask Me Why.”

It is impossible for the great majority of Americans not to take a deep interest in this movement, for we can never forget that English history is in a very large degree our history, and that England is, as Hawthorne likes to call it, “our old home.”

In fact, if we go back less than three centuries, the record of America becomes one with that of the mother country, which first discovered (SS335, 421) and first permanently settled this, and which gave us for leaders and educators Washington, Franklin, the Adamses, and John Harvard.  In descent by far the greater part of us are of English blood or of blood akin to it.[1] We owe to England—­that is, to the British Isles and to the different races which have met and mingled there—­much of our language, literature, law, legislative forms of government, and the essential features of our civilization.  In fact, without a knowledge of her history, we cannot rightly understand our own.

[1] In 1840 the population of the United States, in round numbers, was 17,000,000, of whom the greater part were probably of English descent.  Since then there has been an enormous immigration, 40 per cent of which were from the British Isles; but it is perhaps safe to say that three quarters of our present population are those were were living here in 1840, with their descendents.  Of the immigrants (up to 1890) coming from non-English-speaking races, the Germans and Scandinavians predominated, and it is to them, as we have seen, that the English, in large measure, owe their origin (SS37-39, 126).  It should be noted here that the word “English” is used so as to include the people of the United Kingdom and their descendants on both sides of the Atlantic.

Standing on her soil, we possess practically the same personal rights that we do in America; we speak the same tongue, we meet with the same familiar names.  We feel that whatever is glorious in her past is ours also; that Westminster Abbey belongs as much to us as to her, for our ancestors helped to build its walls and their dust is gathered in its tombs; that Shakespeare and Milton belong to us in like manner, for they wrote in the language we speak, for the instruction and delight of our fathers’ fathers, who beat back the Spanish Armada and gave their lives for liberty on the fields of Marston Moor and Naseby.