We can rightly
use the phrase "a new people," in speaking of Canadians or
Australians, Americans or Afrikanders. But we use it in an entirely
different sense from that in which we use it when speaking of such
communities as those founded by the Northmen and their descendants
during that period of astonishing growth which saw the descendants of
the Norse sea-thieves conquer and transform Normandy, Sicily, and the
British Islands; we use it in an entirely different sense from that in
which we use it when speaking of the new states that grew up around
Warsaw, Kief, Novgorod, and Moscow, as the wild savages of the steppes
and the marshy forests struggled haltingly and stumblingly upward to
become builders of cities and to form stable governments. The kingdoms
of Charlemagne and Alfred were "new," compared to the empire on the
Bosphorus; they were also in every way different; their lines of
ancestral descent had nothing in common with that of the polyglot
realm which paid tribute to the Caesars of Byzantium; their social
problems and after-time history were totally different. This is not
true of those "new" nations which spring direct from old nations.
Brazil, the Argentine, the United States, are all "new" nations,
compared with the nations of Europe; but, with whatever changes in
detail, their civilization is nevertheless of the general European
type, as shown in Portugal, Spain, and England.
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