In the spring of 1885, a pamphlet was published by a citizen of Kentucky directing attention to the effect of certain racial influences in molding the institutions of this State. It was entitled "The Genesis of a Pioneer Commonwealth." The suggestions offered by the writer as to the sources of our organic life were subsequently illustrated and confirmed by an eminent Virginian scholar, Dr. Alexander Brown, in his "Genesis of the United States," published in 1890—a marvel of masterly investigation; a work which throws a flood of light upon the broad expanse of early American history, and is especially remarkable for the critical elaboration, lucidity, and acuteness with which the author has arranged the results of his extensive scheme of historic research. In this work he has noted and traced, from English records contemporary with the first settlement of Virginia, the beginnings of that great duel between conflicting civilizations which closed with the destruction of Spain's naval power at Manila and Santiago. And every scholar who seeks a precise comprehension of the origines of the late war should closely follow the course of investigation pursued by Dr. Brown. Every accessible detail of the desperate and protracted Anglo-Spanish conflict—including the exploits of Elizabeth's captains and the destruction of the Great Armada—come out under this historic searchlight as distinctly and vividly as material objects under the light of day. To citizens of Kentucky who have a critical and philosophic interest in the historic evolution of the Commonwealth, it will be peculiarly attractive in the circumstance that it connects, and in a special sense includes, the Genesis of Kentucky with that of the United States. He suggests in a most interesting way that this Commonwealth is not only a lineal product of the Elizabethan civilization which he has sought to trace, but that—cartographically at least—it formed an integral part of the first Republic established in the New World. In an explanatory communication addressed some years ago to the present writer, Dr. Brown says: "The bounds of the charters which contained the popular charter rights which were the germ of this republic extended between thirty-four degrees (34°) and forty degrees (40°) north latitude, and from ocean to ocean. Kentucky, therefore, was embraced within the first Republic in America."

The sagacious statesmen of Spain were not slow to detect the menacing significance of this Virginian settlement, small as it was; and the conflict then initiated did not cease until the navies of Spain went down under the guns of Dewey and Schley. The persistent machinations of Spanish intrigants to obtain control of Kentucky in the closing years of the Eighteenth Century were part of the same prolonged contest for supremacy upon American soil. Every resource of diplomacy, intrigue, and corruption—or, in modern phrase, of craft and graft—was exhausted by Spain to wrest the germinant Commonwealth from the parent stem. On the other hand, no scheme was more popular with the bold and enterprising Kentuckians—the Vikings of the West—than to wrest the control of the Mississippi River from the desperate grasp of Spain. Even the splendid and seducing allurement of a Spanish alliance was powerless against the transmitted instincts of a Scandinavian or Anglo-Norman stock. But the racial inclination for territorial expansion Kentucky never lost. There was a later manifestation of this spirit or instinct in the annexation of California; an appropriation by force, to be sure, but under recognized "legal forms"; and, still later, it was manifested in disastrous expeditions to the Cuban coast, in which the reckless survivors barely escaped, like the man of Uz, with the skin of their teeth—thanks to a swift steamship and to an indulgent interpretation of the violated law. In the near future, perhaps, we shall have an annexation of the Island under forms which will fully justify the act; annexation on the old lines. As far as race could make them so, the daring adventurers who poured to foreign war from the vast network of streams and streamlets that flowed seaward from the mountains and lowlands of Kentucky were Vikings, with all the fighting characteristics of that ancient breed.[6] Not Vi-Kings, nor "kings" of any sort, but simply the Vik-ings or "Creek-men" who followed their expatriated Jarls wherever a dragon-prow would float; to the land of the Saxon under his greatest king; to the heart of Ireland, where the natives were already "absorbing" the alien Norse; to the ancient Kingdom of Gaul; to Scotland and to the islands of the Atlantic Ridge; and above all to Iceland, the land of mist and snow and fire; to the incomparable mistress of the Northern seas. Through the beautiful Mediterranean, too, they sailed; and gathering to the support of the decadent despotisms of the East, became famous in history and romance as the Varangian Guard which held at bay the Saracen and the Hun. They were "rebels" when they fled from the consolidating despotism of Harold Fairhair. They have been rulers or rebels ever since.

But the story of their greatest exploits you read in the histories of the English race. We have analyzed the claims which Mr. Barrett Wendell has made for the Elizabethan settler upon the Atlantic Coast; and it is instructive to note that another gifted son of New England, Mr. John Fiske, has reached conclusions which he at least would acknowledge give confirmation to the present views, as strong as proof of Holy Writ. "The descendants of these Northmen," he says, "formed a very large proportion of the population of the East Anglian counties, and consequently of the men who founded New England. The East Anglian counties have been conspicuous for resistance to tyranny and for freedom of thought." By parity of reasoning, we may easily prove that the kindred Norman was the founder of civilization in England, and, in direct sequence and by filiation of race, of civilization in the Colony of Virginia; and, by a gradual evolution, in the States of the South and West.

Far back in the history of our race there stands, luminous and large, in his milieu of mediÆval mist, a mounted conqueror with sword and torch—the immediate offspring of Scandinavian Jarls—the remote progenitor of the Virginian "Cavalier." It is the founder of that Anglo-Norman civilization of which we form a part, and which, in many ways, still responds to the impulse of that imperial brain.

William the Norman presented in vivid epitome the characteristic traits of his race, with other traits or variations of these traits that made him almost an abnormal figure even in the history of those times. He has been commonly depicted as physically a giant among his fellows; but Lord Lytton (a good authority) discredits these legends of gigantic stature; it is seldom we find, he declares, the association of great size and commanding intellect in great men; it is really a violation of the natural law, though possibly the great Norman may have been, like Abraham Lincoln, an exception to the general rule. His physical forces were certainly subjected to severe tests. His personal leadership in the wintry marches through the North of England were, practically, paralleled in later days by the wintry marches of our Scandinavian general, George Rogers Clark, in the vast territories of the North and West. The prodigious fortitude and endurance manifested in these campaigns proved beyond all question the staying capacity of the Scandinavian blood. The royal Norman had all the tastes of a forest-born man; not a mere taste for the sports of the field as known to the English gentlemen of a later period, but a wild, almost demoniac passion for the atrocities of the chase as practised by the early Norman kings. A love of royal sport does not discredit a modern ruler of men; but scarcely such sport as this. The "wild king," says an old English chronicler, "loves wild beasts as if he were a wild beast himself and the father of wild beasts." Churches and manors were swept away to create forests and dens and retreats for the creatures he loved to slay. He ruled, conquered, hunted, ravaged, "harried," and subjugated from Brittany to Scotland; and yet, says the same old chronicler in his "Flowers of History," "he was such a lover of peace that a girl laden with gold might traverse the whole of England without harm."

This may or may not be a "flower of history"; but if true, it is a startling historic fact.