America...............................

    "He walked slowly toward the dark grove.  He had a complicated brain and there were things going on back there from time to time that he only dimly understood, so he relied on his instincts, but he was learning all the time.  The faith itself was simple:  he believed in the dignity of man.  His ancestors were Huguenots, refugees of a chained and bloody Europe.  He had learned their stories from the cradle.  He had grown up believing in America and the individual and it was a stronger faith than his faith in God.  This was the land where no man had to bow.  In this place at last a man could stand up free of the past, free of tradition and blood ties and the curse of royalty and become what he wished to become.  This was the first place on earth where the man mattered more than the state.  True freedom had begun here and it would spread eventually over all the earth.  But it had begun here.  The fact of slavery upon this incredibly beautiful clean earth was appalling, but even more than that was the horror of old Europe, the curse of nobility, which the South was transplanting to the new soil.  They were forming a new aristocracy, a new breed of glittering men, and Chamberlain had come to crush it.  But he was fighting for the dignity of man and in that way he was fighting for himself.   If men were equal in America, all these former Poles and English and Czechs and blacks, then they were equal everywhere, and there was really no such thing as a foreigner; there were only free men and slaves.  And so it was not even patriotism but a new faith.  The Frenchman fights for France, but the American fights for mankind, for freedom;  for the people, not the land."
-attributed to the mind of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain by Michael Shaara in Killer Angels