"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."

          This quote is saying that no one who came to this country as an immigrant came because they love America. They came because they thought they could make better lives for themselves financially and had no intention of adopting new customs or shifting their loyalties to a new idea of American patriotism. In fact, most seemed very determined to maintain their loyalties to wherever they came from by doing whatever they could to stick to their customs and practices. America was advertised to the rest of the world as a place where you could do whatever you wanted and have the same rights as everyone else no matter where you came from or what your heritage is people saw that as opportunity to better themselves, not a whole new way of living and thinking all together.

He is also saying that this reality has slowed down the progress of this country. Instead of everyone participating in a new hybrid melting pot America where new customs evolve from "cross pollination" of older cultures, people are instead defensive of their own individual cultures to the point where they are routinized in older ways as a means of making sure they never fade out of existence. This is why mainstream American culture is predominately still Anglo-Saxon. Because the first Europeans to arrive were Anglo-Saxon, they were the majority when other cultures began making their way over. The resistance to blend together with each other kept everyone set on making sure their own cultures were no "corrupted by those surrounding them. That meant that even the Anglo-Saxon culture, the one with the biggest numbers, and the one that had the most, if not all the influence on the initial formation of our government, became just as routinized and resistant to change as the other smaller groups.

When he says our whole legal and political system remained more English than the English, he is pointing out that the very people who fled to this land to seek freedom, and held a revolution to solidify that freedom, have hindered their own progress through stubbornness and are now more conservative then those they once saw as too conservative.