The Hindoos are subjects of Victoria, but they are not
Englishmen.
Franklin shows that it was possible to produce a most genuine American
of unquestioned greatness in the eighteenth century, and with all
possible deference to Mr. Lowell and Mr. King, I venture the assertion
that George Washington was as genuine an American as Lincoln or
Franklin. He was an American of the eighteenth and not of the
nineteenth century, but he was none the less an American. I will go
further. Washington was not only an American of a pure and noble type,
but he was the first thorough American in the broad, national sense,
as distinct from the colonial American of his time.
After all, what is it to be an American? Surely it does not consist in
the number of generations merely which separate the individual from
his forefathers who first settled here. Washington was fourth in
descent from the first American of his name, while Lincoln was in
the sixth generation. This difference certainly constitutes no real
distinction. There are people to-day, not many luckily, whose families
have been here for two hundred and fifty years, and who are as utterly
un-American as it is possible to be, while there are others, whose
fathers were immigrants, who are as intensely American as any one can
desire or imagine. In a new country, peopled in two hundred and fifty
years by immigrants from the Old World and their descendants, the
process of Americanization is not limited by any hard and fast rules
as to time and generations, but is altogether a matter of individual
and race temperament.
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