of the streams flowing into the Atlantic. When the fight at Lexington
took place they had no settlements beyond the mountain chain on our
western border. It had taken them over a century and a half to spread
from the Atlantic to the Alleghanies. In the next three quarters of a
century they spread from the Alleghanies to the Pacific. In doing this
they not only dispossessed the Indian tribes, but they also won the
land from its European owners. Britain had to yield the territory
between the Ohio and the Great Lakes. By a purchase, of which we
frankly announced that the alternative would be war, we acquired from
France the vast, ill-defined region known as Louisiana. From the
Spaniards, or from their descendants, we won the lands of Florida,
Texas, New Mexico, and California.

All these lands were conquered after we had become a power,
independent of every other, and one within our own borders; when we
were no longer a loose assemblage of petty seaboard communities, each
with only such relationship to its neighbor as was implied in their
common subjection to a foreign king and a foreign people. Moreover, it
is well always to remember that at the day when we began our career as
a nation we already differed from our kinsmen of Britain in blood as
well as in name; the word American already had more than a merely
geographical signification. Americans belong to the English race only
in the sense in which Englishmen belong to the German. The fact that
no change of language has accompanied the second wandering of our
people, from Britain to America, as it accompanied their first, from
Germany to Britain, is due to the further fact that when the second
wandering took place the race possessed a fixed literary language,
and, thanks to the ease of communication, was kept in touch with the
parent stock. The change of blood was probably as great in one case as
in the other. The modern Englishman is descended from a Low-Dutch