and an indifference to luxury1-all valuable social

assets.

Americanization of the Appalachian inhabitants involves moving them forward two centuries on the dial of civilization and of Americanism. "Time has lingered in Appalachia."15 The people are unacquainted with civilization; they constitute sound material for the Americanization process. They must be released from their shackles of ignorance. They must be freed from their blood-feuds. Their loyalty which is high in view of their isolation must be put in tune with current American ideals. For the reason that they and the nation have grown apart, they must receive the sympathetic attention of the nation.

They must be protected from inbreeding and the resultant degeneracy that is found in many mountain regions. They must be educated industrially, freed from their poverty, and enabled to possess the fullness of their localities. Education must be extended widely and without stint by Federal, state, and local appropriations. The regular day schools and industrial and trade schools must be established wherever mountain people live. Model farms are needed in every mountain county. Traveling teachers would be able to work a revolution. Citizenship work is a necessity. The training of leaders from their own numbers is one of the greatest needs-leaders to show the way agriculturally, industrially, domestic

"E. C. Semple, The Influences of a Geographic Environment, p. 601.

"H. Kephart, Our Southern Highlanders, p. 18.

ally, patriotically. The result of this Americanization program would be the training of good farmers, good housewives, good mechanics, good patriots and Americans.

PART THREE

THE FOREIGN-BORN AND AMERICAN

TRAITS

CHAPTER XI

THE NORTH EUROPEAN IMMIGRANT

The North European immigrant includes the English, the Celt, the Scandinavian, the Dutch, and the German. These peoples came as colonists and immigrants and gave Americanism its fundamental

trend.

The English stand at the head of the group in their influence upon America. They have given us our language. In the way that form circumscribes and gives direction to tendencies; so the English language has exerted a widely unsuspected influence upon our American life. By using that language, we have been led unconsciously to the storehouses of thought, literature, and customs of the English people with their millennium of national experiences.

Our fundamental social institutions have come from the English. Our attitudes toward the family and the school originated in large part in England. Our political and legal institutions are English. England gave us our first ideas concerning civil liberty and the doctrine of the consent of the gov

erned. Our standards of right and wrong and our religious conceptions are of British development.

The English colonist and immigrant have contributed great intellectual powers to our American life. As their language has brought to us the richness of Greek, Latin, Celtic, and Anglo-Saxon elements; so their race has contributed to our type an amalgamation of Celtic, Norman-French, and AngloSaxon traits. They have brought more bodily vigor, endurance and constitutional energy than any other group of immigrants.

Their psychical gifts include decision and nerveenergy and independence in thought and action. "Each man walks, eats, drinks, shaves, dresses, gesticulates, and in every manner acts and suffers without reference to the bystanders," except to be careful not to interfere with them. Each new comer from England is an island in himself.1 He is selfcontained. He brings a towering degree of selfassurance. "Of all persons, the Englishman stands firmest in his shoes."

His social contributions to American life include an emphasis upon plain dealing, a habit of matching plain force with plain force, a reluctance to run away, a desire to die game. He has brought to our shores an admiration for custom and propriety. He likes those customs "whereof the memory of man runneth not back to the contrary." He is fastidious in wanting things done in good form. He prides himself on the exactness of his clothing and equipage. He has stood for individualism and conservatism. He ad

1R. W. Emerson, English Traits, p. 104.

mires you if you are decided in your own opinions and tender toward honored customs. He possesses an anomalous element in his democratic character as evidenced by the homage he pays to wealth and to the laws of inheritance, in his tolerance of an antiquated House of Lords and a king stripped of political power.

The Englishman's self-restraint is especially noticeable when compared with American volubleness. His stoical self-control contrasts with American enthusiasm. His conservatism is clearly delineated when thrown upon the screen of American adaptability. An English publisher hesitates to accept a manuscript in an entirely new field, while an American publisher will not consider a manuscript unless it represents a new realm of thought. An American officer visited a tailor shop in London in order to have the pocket in his military coat altered. The English tailor after examining the coat replied: "It can't be done." "But," said the officer, "do you know what an American tailor would do? He would examine the pocket and say: 'Be seated; it'll be ready for you in twenty minutes.'"

Americanization should include a program for the development of a better understanding by Americans of their English heritage. In our schools, we are taught concerning our wars against England; our hatred for the Red Coats of Revolutionary days stays with us. We are rarely taught our indebtedness to the English, that we were a part of England politically for two centuries-a longer period than that of our existence as a separate nation. We for