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Updated: June 27, 2025
But when I look around me at the American-born I have come to know as my close friends, I wonder whether, after all, the foreign-born does not make in some sense a better American whether he is not able to get a truer perspective; whether his is not the deeper desire to see America greater; whether he is not less content to let its faulty institutions be as they are; whether in seeing faults more clearly he does not make a more decided effort to have America reach those ideals or those fundamentals of his own land which he feels are in his nature, and the best of which he is anxious to graft into the character of his adopted land?
We have seen the alacrity with which the American-born populace, the peaceablest and most good-natured race in the world, and the most personally independent and intelligent, and the least fitted to submit to the irksomeness and exasperation of regimental discipline, sprang, at the first tap of the drum, to arms not for gain, nor even glory, nor to repel invasion but for an emblem, a mere abstraction for the life, the safety of the flag.
True, there was a little tendency to allude to the glories of Bunker Hill and the like; but this tendency was evinced in a manner rather amusing than objectionable to an Englishman. If there exists in the American heart a drop of bitterness for the English, I never discovered it. I am writing now of the American-born American.
Or will you say that a navy officer is a man, but that an American-born citizen, whose grandsire may have ennobled him by pouring out his blood at Bunker Hill will you say that, by entering the service of his country as a common seaman, and standing ready to fight her foes, he thereby loses his manhood at the very time he most asserts it?
Labor was cheap and plentiful, too, and being American-born, was willing and intelligent. Perhaps Anthony Cardew's sins of later years were due to a vast impatience that the labor of the early seventies was no longer to be had. The Cardew fortune began in the seventies. Up to that time there was a struggle, but in the seventies Anthony did two things.
To descend abruptly from the sublime, to very near the ridiculous, I had need last summer of a boy to go with a lady on a trap and help about the stable. So I applied to a friend's coachman, a hard-working Englishman, who was delighted to get the place for his nephew an American-born boy the child of a sister, in great need.
To the excited imagination of the Federalists, these men seemed leagued with France in an attempt to destroy the liberties of the country; to get rid of the most violent of these writers, and at the same time to punish American-born editors who too freely criticised the administration, seemed to them essential.
For the man American-born they may be summed up in Washington, the rest of the "Fathers," and the Constitution; and those who leave England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Germany, and Scandinavia to make their home in America soon come to share in these possessions. While the immigrants from southern Europe do not comprehend the Constitution, they know Washington.
She looked like the American-born daughter of Swedish or Norwegian emigrants and her large-knuckled hands, too, bespoke the peasant strain. "Quit it, Niobe, and tell me your name." The girl raised her tearful eyes. "Kunkel Augusta Kunkel." "Oh, German?" The girl nodded. "Well, Miss Kunkel" she suppressed a smile "tell me your troubles and perhaps you'll feel better."
She told him he looked like Pan. Early in their acquaintance she had asked him if he were not a Dane, not a Norwegian, if he had not viking blood? She said that he suggested sagas and berserkers and fjords "not that I am sure what any of those words mean!" His answering laugh had been as wild as a delighted child's. No; he was American-born, of an English father and an Irish mother, he said.
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