We were for the most part freed from alien interference, and could, so far as we dared, experiment with political and social ideals.

The land was unoccupied, and its settlement offered an unprecedented area and abundance of economic opportunity.

After the Revolution the whole political and social organization was renewed, and made both more serviceable and more flexible.

Under such happy circumstances the New World was assuredly destined to become to its inhabitants a Land of Promise,--a land in which men were offered a fairer chance and a better future than the best which the Old World could afford.
No more explicit expression has ever been given to the way in which the Land of Promise was first conceived by its children than in the "Letters of an American Farmer." This book was written by a French immigrant, Hector St.John de Crevecoeur before the Revolution, and is informed by an intense consciousness of the difference between conditions in the Old and in the New World.

"What, then, is an American, this new man ?" asks the Pennsylvanian farmer.