"Stealthy winning and sterile hoarding are the marks of a degraded and outlawed caste. When these tendencies show themselves in a member of an honest race, they have come down from some forgotten interloper. The Raseys are the true representatives of the transported wretches who, and whose progeny, have been a dead weight upon the States originally afflicted with them, and upon those into which they have wandered out. In their native debasement, they furnish material for usurpation to work upon and with; raised here and there into fitful eminence, they infect the class they intrude upon with meannesses not its own. "Thomas Dudley, writing to England from New England in its earliest days, when, as he frankly owns, it offered 'little to be enjoyed and much to be endured,' is explicit as to the class of men he and his colleagues would have join them. He invites only godly men of substance. Such, he says, 'cannot dispose of themselves and their estates more to God's glory.' Those who would 'come to plant for worldly ends' he dissuades altogether; for 'the poorer sort' it was 'not time yet.' As for reckless adventurers and the destitute idle, who sought the New World for gold or an indolent subsistence, when these, 'seeing no other means than by their labor to feed themselves,' went back discouraged, or off to find some more indulgent plantation, the colony felt itself 'lightened, not weakened.' "The chief distinctive mark of high race is the quality the Romans called _fortitudo_,--a word of larger meaning than we commonly intend by ours derived from it: that strength of soul, namely, which gives way as little before work as before danger or under suffering. A Roman has defined this Roman fortitude as the quality which enables a man fearlessly to obey the highest law, whether by enduring or by achieving. "Another mark of high race is its trust in itself. The early heads of New England did not try to secure a position to their children. They knew that blood finds its level just as certainly as water does. Degenerate sons they disowned in advance. "Westlake, you ought to know New England better. Even if your memory did not prompt you to do it justice, there ought to be a voice to answer for it in your heart. But I find ancestry is very soon lost in the mists of antiquity down here. You come early into the advantages of a mythical background. Must I teach you your own descent?" "I thank you. I am acquainted with it. My great-grandfather was an Englishman,--a man of some consideration, as I have been informed. He went over to Massachusetts; but my grandfather left it, as soon as he was of age, for a newer State, where he could enjoy greater freedom."