Two Centuries of New Milford Connecticut: An Account of the Bi-Centennial Celebration of the Founding of the Town Held June 15, 16, 17, and 18, 1907, With a Number of Historical Articles and ReminiscencesVarious
History
Two Centuries of New Milford Connecticut: An Account of the Bi-Centennial Celebration of the Founding of the Town Held June 15, 16, 17, and 18, 1907, With a Number of Historical Articles and Reminiscences
Various
New Milford (Conn. : Town) -- History
“But a larger view than this must be taken if we would estimate the
importance and meaning of this village Celebration. The articulation of
interests in the life of our nation as it exists to-day is much more
difficult than it was when these villages grew by natural processes into
the early national life. Multitudinous and heterogeneous masses are
mingled in our body politic to-day, coming from nations that know
nothing about the traditions of Puritan, or Pilgrim, or Dutch, or
Cavalier. In many of these nations from which these peoples come and
mingle in our life, the only thought of government is that of power, of
police force, or suppression. Danger threatens us as we attempt to
assimilate into our own national life these heterogeneous masses. It is
not that they are bad, but that they come to us with no such conceptions
of the simplicity and articulation of life and government as our fathers
possessed who established the villages of New England. Our
responsibility is to spread everywhere the great principles that lay at
the foundations of village life in early New England. It is not from
northern Europe that immigrants come who are a menace to these
institutions that have made the United States what they are to-day. The
real problem is the assimilation of unassociated races who are making a
large portion of our body politic. Twenty million of the eighty million
who are citizens of the United States are of the brown-skinned,
undeveloped races. They represent fundamentally different ideals from
those that made New England and the southern colonial States the power
they were. It is for us in this generation to stimulate in these
brown-skinned people the higher conceptions and loftier ideals
represented in these villages that furnished the unit of development in
the early years of the nation. There are two United States to-day, and
we cannot neglect either of them with safety. There is Continental
United States, the familiar old stretch of territory from ocean to ocean
and from gulf to northern Alaska. This furnishes problems enough for the
children of the Pilgrims to meet and solve. But another United States
has been added in these later years, and that is Insular United States.
They were brought to us through the arbitrament of war. We did not seek
them; we perhaps are the poorer for their possession. But the great
problem that God in His providence has put upon us to-day is the
elevation and redemption of the masses of these island peoples. They
have no village traditions or life to look back to. They have no
intelligent conception of freedom. Morality is almost an unknown quality
as we use the term. One great problem before Americans to-day,
therefore, is the Americanizing and Christianizing of these masses that
have become a part of our body politic, and whose future will largely
determine the future of our entire nation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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