Again, the new form may represent merely a splitting off from a long
established, highly developed, and specialized nation. In this case
the nation is usually spoken of as a "young," and is correctly spoken
of as a "new," nation; but the term should always be used with a clear
sense of the difference between what is described in such case, and
what is described by the same term in speaking of a civilized nation
just developed from barbarism. Carthage and Syracuse were new cities
compared to Tyre and Corinth; but the Greek or Phoenician race was in
every sense of the word as old in the new city as in the old city. So,
nowadays, Victoria or Manitoba is a new community compared with
England or Scotland; but the ancestral type of civilization and
culture is as old in one case as in the other. I of course do not mean
for a moment that great changes are not produced by the mere fact that
the old civilized race is suddenly placed in surroundings where it has
again to go through the work of taming the wilderness, a work finished
many centuries before in the original home of the race; I merely mean
that the ancestral history is the same in each case. We can rightly
use the phrase "a new people," in speaking of Canadians or
Australians, Americans or Afrikanders. But we use it in an entirely
different sense from that in which we use it when speaking of such
communities as those founded by the Northmen and their descendants
during that period of astonishing growth which saw the descendants of
the Norse sea-thieves conquer and transform Normandy, Sicily, and the
British Islands; we use it in an entirely different sense from that in
which we use it when speaking of the new states that grew up around
Warsaw, Kief, Novgorod, and Moscow, as the wild savages of the steppes
and the marshy forests struggled haltingly and stumblingly upward to
become builders of cities and to form stable governments. The kingdoms
of Charlemagne and Alfred were "new," compared to the empire on the
Bosphorus; they were also in every way different; their lines of
ancestral descent had nothing in common with that of the polyglot
realm which paid tribute to the Cæsars of Byzantium; their social
problems and after-time history were totally different. This is not
true of those "new" nations which spring direct from old nations.
Brazil, the Argentine, the United States, are all "new" nations,
compared with the nations of Europe; but, with whatever changes in
detail, their civilization is nevertheless of the general European
type, as shown in Portugal, Spain, and England. The differences
between these "new" American and these "old" European nations are not
as great as those which separate the "new" nations one from another,
and the "old" nations one from another. There are in each case very
real differences between the new and the old nation; differences both
for good and for evil; but in each case there is the same ancestral
history to reckon with, the same type of civilization, with its
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