The Wonderful Story of Washington: and the Meaning of His Life for the Youth and Patriotism of AmericaStevens, C. M. (Charles McClellan)
History
The Wonderful Story of Washington: and the Meaning of His Life for the Youth and Patriotism of America
Stevens, C. M. (Charles McClellan)
Washington, George, 1732-1799 -- Juvenile literature
The Northern Colonies and the Southern Colonies were, true enough,
antagonistic in their origin, entirely opposite in the social
differences between the severe Puritan and the aristocratic Cavalier,
and worse than all, they were antagonistic in their religion, the
North being many kinds of dissenters, and the South, in its governing
classes, being Episcopalian. Their social, religious and material
interests never had been the same, and they had little in common even
in the French and Indian wars. This outline contrast is given to show
how the question, especially for the South, was not material profit or
of opposition to oppression from force, but was the expression of an
American Ideal uniting all minds, as a meaning for the equal rights of
all in our humanity. It shows that there is an ideal of human rights
that has the allegiance of human hearts above all considerations of
flattery, or coertion, or for any of the thousands of considerations
that may cause an individual judgment or fix the will. There may be
amazing differences in personal and party interests, but there can be
none, even in the varieties of intelligence or conditions, when it
comes to the rights to freedom in the views of genuine Americans. Only
partisans attack the motives of persons who are trying to advance
human liberty and peace according to the duties and rights of
civilization. By such signs shall ye know them and beware. They are
not Americans and their moral deformity is the peril of America. The
real idealist lives the vision of moral order, not only for his group,
but for all the world. The moral law for each and all is our idealism
of the universe.
III. MANY MEN OF MANY MINDS
England could not manage its American colonial interests because the
government had no ideal of the colonies beyond that of a commercial
business, and the colonies could not handle the interests of England
in America because each colony was a separate organization having
political interests together in common only in the British Parliament.
On that account they never felt together, except as their mutual
interest in Parliament was injured. Notice this fundamental origin of
social union, and see how it had to be wrangled over from the close of
the Revolutionary War in 1781, to the adoption of the Constitution,
and the election of a president under it in 1789. And even then, a
fundamental origin for social interests, and, therefore, of
patriotism, was not achieved until a frightful civil war closed the
struggle for separate units of interest, as independent
sovereignities, in 1865.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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