People's Pilot, Volume 3, Number 7, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 August 1893 — THE OLD AMERICAN STOCK. [ARTICLE]

THE OLD AMERICAN STOCK.

’Tw«i Good Blood That Reddened In It« Veins. As we look back to the days of “The Lowell Offering” and of Lucy Larcom’s girlhood, says the Boston Watchman editorially, we are reminded that the old American stock was a good one. It represented a sober, independent, thoughtful, enterprising, lawabiding and God-fearing race of people whose ancestors, born of England’s best brain and bone, had conquered the wilderness, built towns and cities, established schools and college*, framed laws for their own government, worshiped God in thought and in deed, shed their blood in defense of their liberties, and founded a republic under the protecting shield of which manhood could have every needed opportunity for free and natural development. It was from this stock that men,like Webster and Lincoln, whose early poverty would have been in almost any other land an insuperable barrier to their advancement, came forth to be shapers of their nation’s destinies, as it was from this stock that the gentle Whittier and his sister singer, Lucy Larcom, sprang, both of whom worked their way upward from humble surroundings, not simply because our free, republican life could offer them encouragement, but also because, in the best sense of the phrase, it was good blood that reddened in their veins. Had the world been searched from polo to pole a better stock of people for the colonization of the continent could not have been found, and did we feel that this stock had disappeared, or had wholly ceased to dominate the life of the nation, we should have the best of reasons to fear for the future.