Now it is a common charge against the American Republic that it is unhistoric and has no past; but the charge is singularly false. It has a past which is not only historic, but heroic. Nay, it is heroic not only in the normal sense of things that are historic, but almost in the sense in which we speak of the prehistoric. We feel there was a heroic age of the Republic; and a legend of its founding, like the legend of Rome. Its founders built on affirmations so wide and (as they themselves truly said) so self-evident that there was something about them beyond place and time. There really is something about the Declaration of Independence that is almost like the stone tables of the Ten Commandments. It is so much a fact that, if we like it, we can even make fun of it; and the Americans themselves do make fun of it. In their own stories they do treat the cherry-tree of George Washington as something like the apple-tree of Adam. In their own lighter moments, they do seem to imply that Benjamin Franklin must have been as much of a bore and a nuisance as Socrates. But men only deal thus lightly with things that they feel as ancient and fundamental; and there is this feeling about the American fundamentals. It does not, for instance, seem unnatural to talk about the Father of the Republic, as we talk of the Fathers of the Christian Church or of the old pagan city. And the idea for which they stood is one that can never be merely new-fangled, just as it can never be merely old-fashioned; something which can be denied, but can never be discredited; something which they expressed far better, but which (in the looser language of modernity) is expressed best by saying that the normal man must be master of the national fate.

-March 23, 1918, Illustrated London News