It has been said that the Scot is never so much at home as when he isabroad. Under this half-jesting reference to one of thecharacteristics of our race, there abides a sober truth, namely, thatthe Scotsman carries with him from his parent home into the worldwithout no half-hearted acceptance of the duties required of him inthe land of his adoption. He is usually a public-spirited citizen, auseful member of society, wherever you find him. But that does notlessen the warmth of his attachment to the place of his birth, or theland of his forbears. Be his connection with Scotland near or remote,there is enshrined in the inner sanctuary of his heart, memories,sentiments, yearnings, that are the heritage of generations with whomlove of their country was a dominant passion, and pride in the deedsthat her children have done an incentive to effort and an antidoteagainst all that was base or ignoble.
It is a fact that goes to the core of the secular struggle for humanfreedom that whole-hearted Americanism finds no jarring note in thesentiment of the Scot, be that sentiment ever so intense. In thesedulous cultivation of the Scottish spirit there is nothing alien,and, still more emphatically, nothing harmful, to the institutionsunder which we live. The things that nourish the one, engenderattachment and loyalty to the other. So, as we cherish the memories ofthe Motherland, keep in touch with the simple annals of ourchildhood's home, or the home of our kin, bask in the fireside glow ofits homely humor, or dwell in imagination amid the haunts of oldromance, we are the better Americans for the Scottish heritage fromwhich heart and mind alike derive inspiration and delight.
It is as difficult to separate the current of Scottish migration tothe American Colonies, or to the United States that grew out of them,from the larger stream which issued from England, as it is todistinguish during the last two hundred years the contributions byScotsmen from those of Englishmen to the great body of Englishliterature. We have the first census of the new Republic, in the year1790, and an investigator who classified this enumeration according towhat he conceived to be the nationality of the names, found that thetotal free, white, population numbering 3,250,000 contained 2,345,844people of English origin; 188,589 of Scottish origin, and 44,273 ofIrish origin. The system of classification is manifestly loose, andthe distribution of parent nationalities entirely at variance withknown facts. That part of the population described as Irish waslargely Ulster-Scottish, the true Irish never having emigrated in anyconsiderable numbers until they felt the pressure of the potatofamine, fifty years later. There is excellent authority for thestatement that, at the outbreak of the Revolutionary War one-third ofthe entire population of Pennsylvania was of Ulster-Scottish origin. ANew England historian, quoted by Whitelaw Reid, counts that between1730 and 1770 at least half a million souls were transferred fromUlster to the Colonies—more than half of the Presbyterian populationof Ulster—and that at the time of the Revolution they made one-sixthof the total population of the nascent Republic. Another authorityfixes the inhabitants of Scottish ancestry in the nine Colonies southof New England at about 385,000. He counts that less than half of theentire population of the Colonies was of English origin, and thatnearly, or quite one-third of it, had a direct Scottish ancestry.
These conclusions find powerful su