THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. SATURDAY, JANUARY 15, 1910. THE SPIRIT THAT MADE AMERICA.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 9691, 15 January 1910, Page 4

THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. SATURDAY, JANUARY 15, 1910. THE SPIRIT THAT MADE AMERICA.

Mr A. Maurice Low is an English Journalist and publicist of recognised ability who has dealt much with American affairs, artd always with care and candour. Some nine years ago, writes the New York "Times" after living for more than twenty years in the United States, it occurred to him to begin a systematic inquiry as to the question whether the American people were a new race, with distinct racial characteristics and a developed psychology of their own, or were simply the modification of a parent stock, retaining the characteristics of their begetting. The first instalment of the results of this inquiry is found in his volume "The American People." The specific title of the volume is "The Planting of a Nation." Obviously, the question is a somewhat indefinite one. It depends on what one calls "a new race." Every people, even the moat conservative and humdrum, is in these days of prompt communication and easy migration, constantly undergoing modification. It is not easy to say at what point a new race comes into existence, or by what kind and degree of change its "psychological" independence is to he recognised. He finds in the United States practically a new species, and undertakes to trace its origin, and he has made a very attractive and stimulating book. The larger part of JMr Low's volume is devoted to the consideration of the "Puritan" element in American life. That may appear a somewhat hackneyed subject. It is far from being so in Mr Low's hand". He disputes vigorously the generally-received conception of the Puritan. In tracing the conception which be believes to be the true one, and which he would substitute for the one so long mistakenly accepted, he goes back to the society from which the Puritan sprang, before and during and after the uprising that overthrew Charles 1., recounts the religious and social conditions that gave him his peculiar characteristics, follows him to the New. England Coast, portrays the new conJitions surrounding him there, and lis reaction to them, and finally aictures him as the energetic, ag-

gressive, persistent, and indomitable conqueror and organiser of a practically new world. The essential element in the Puritan as Mr Low depicts him is his instinctive and uncompromising devotion to the right of self-government. This deI votion was deepened, strengthened, vitalised by his profound religious belief, which made the rights of selfgovernment equivalent to the right to exercise God's will in the life he had to live wherever he might live it. And this endowment, under the conditions by which successively he was surrounded in America, made him the potent instrument for the foundation of a democracy with the theory fur the logical consequences of which he had little sympathy. His own notion of self-government was, substantially, government by himself, and by no means government by others in whose company he found himself. But this notion, rife in each new community, as the land was peopled, made each a new centre of home rule, until, as organisation and co-operation became necessary, the basis of politicial life became the . equal rights of each community, I and, finally, the equal rights of the members of each community. By the time the struggle for independence from England arose, the Puritan was a fully-developed, intensely earnest, and superbly-efficient democrat.