Assignment #1 "We are all foreign-born or the descendants of foreign-born, and if distinctions are to be made between us they should rightly be on some other ground than indigenousness. The early colonists came over with motives no less colonial than the later. They did not come to be assimilated in an American melting-pot. They did not come to adopt the culture of the American Indian. They had not the smallest intention of "giving themselves without reservation" to the new country. They came to get freedom to live as they wanted. They came to escape from the stifling air and chaos of the old world; they came to make their fortune in a new land. They invented no new social framework. Rather they brought over bodily the old ways to which they had been accustomed. Tightly concentrated on a hostile frontier, they were conservative beyond belief. Their pioneer daring was reserved for the objective conquest of material resources. In their folkways, in their social and political institutions, they were, like every colonial people, slavishly imitative of the mother-country. So that, in spite of the "Revolution," our whole legal and political system remained more English than the English, petrified and unchanging, while in England law developed to meet the needs of the changing times." What I can take from this quote is that the author is trying to say that the first settlers of the United States came to this land in order to seek freedom. They wanted freedom from the lands they previously had inhabited because the laws and customs were to them unjust. They wanted to be in a place where they did not have to conform and where they could be themselves. So they set sail for the America's, but when they got here and began to settle and spread in this new land they began to change. Not in the sense of their customs but in what they would tolerate. The new settlers had become the very same persecuters they had once escaped from. The settlers would begin to set up laws and a legal system that would mirror those of the english. They would become extremely xeonphobic which is ironic since they themselves were immigrants to this land. Even their revolution could be considered a sham because even though they had fought to free themselves from the tyranny of the british they too would become tyrannts seeking to swallow up as much of this land as they possibly could. Though there were already people native to this land and who had layed claim to these lands they would be forced to move as the setters gobbled up as much of the country as they possibly could. Even though they were free from the british they would not adopt and change to the times as the british would. They would remain the same using out dated laws and a flawed legal system to govern the land.