This question of national age becomes more puzzling the more we think about it, but in trying to solve it let us turn to America, the land that everyone says is young. We may, as we have seen, dismiss at once, I think, certain interpretations of age. We may discard the thought of any analogy with an organism. We can date a human being as five, fourteen, twenty-one, or three score and ten years of age, and have it mean something. We cannot date a nation as one century, five, or twenty, and have it mean anything with scientific accuracy. Again, we may discard the thought of independence or political nationhood. My young friend, probably taught by his elders, evidently had that point in mind. Arguing that way, we should be a century older than[Pg 248] Italy or Germany, but those who argue that America is young would not accept that conclusion. We have got, again, to dismiss as a criterion the stage of culture which a people has arrived at—the arts, inventions, knowledge which they have inherited from the past. Every settler who came to America had behind him all the past just as much as did his family or neighbors who remained behind. The seventeenth century English, Scotch, Germans, Swedes, Dutch, and others who came here in our first century were not barbarians. They had the entire inheritance from the past. They were heirs of Greece and Rome, of the Reformation and the Renaissance, as much as those who continued in the old countries; and every man who has come here since has been of the same national age as those he has left behind. III In analyzing this idea of our being a young nation, I cannot see that there is any valid way in which to date ourselves as compared with others, and I believe that the constant insisting upon this misleading way of putting the truth (for there is a truth about our case which I shall elaborate in a moment) is beginning to do us deep hurt. I believe that it would be far better for the development of our best selves, individually and nationally, if instead of consistently thinking and speaking of the American people as “young,” we should think and say the clear truth, which is that we are an old people, the same age as our European cousins, who moved into an unsettled world. Not only is the content of these two ideas very different, but so also are the inferences often very loosely and carelessly drawn from them. [Pg 249]