With all their divergences and differences, however, there was between the North and South one point of contact which was typical, racial, and individual, and which in its persistence grew to be national. It was of course a continuation of Anglo-Saxon tradition, applied to new circumstances which made it but the more powerful in influence; but it was a tradition which was to be potent in the formation of the American spirit. This was the home. For the home, as we know it, is almost, if not entirely, uniquely American and English. There may be entered a saving clause concerning the Teutonic nations, but it would not impeach the full integrity of the statement. Only in the Anglo-Saxon races has the home possessed the peculiar sanctity which it holds in this day among those same peoples; and in America this has been distinctively the case. For a race of pioneers, which builds in the desert its own continuing cities, sees in its edifices, however humble at first, something which is not evident to the inhabiter of ancient cities. The dweller in the wilderness gazes with a peculiar affection upon the little tract which he has reclaimed; and the cottage or even hut, with its humble household gods and goods, takes in his eyes a strange and extrinsic value because of that which they represent to him, in achievement and of necessity. Therefore, north and south, the first thought of the pioneer settler was to establish the home; and the first requisite of the home is its presiding deity, the wife. Thus the American woman had from the first a peculiar value in the eyes of her husband; she was more surely "flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone" than were other wives, for she shared of necessity all his perils and triumphs, while his work was patiently done for her as for himself. She represented to him his gage to fortune as well as his best-beloved and most-needed companion; and she was necessary to him. This attitude of the husband, unexpressed, perhaps uncomprehended, was none the less effective in forming the womanly ideal of the home. Because that home had been gained--in the aggregate at last, in the individual at first--by the sweat of her goodman's brow and was maintained and guarded by the labor of his hands and the courage of his heart, therefore the American wife was conscious of a peculiar duty toward the husband, a peculiar tenderness toward the home, which to her represented as much as to him.