her German newspaper actively competing with the English. For a number of years the community ably supported a German daily. It is a significant fact that there are not now sufficient readers of German to support even a weekly. Pennsylvania Dutch is still spoken in the northern parts of Lancaster County, but comparatively few of the population can read German; and while they may converse in the German dialect, having been educated in the public schools, they read English newspapers. Journalism in English has now completely crowded out the German here." Ceaselessly this irresistible force of amalgamation and assimilation is at work. The schools, the newspapers, "the spirit of America”—vague, intangible, but very concrete-encompass the foreigner to draw him under its influence and to make him what he desires to be an American.

It was remarked in the first volume that the belief long held in the intellectual and physical vigor of an unmixed strain has now been scientifically proved to be a fallacy, and that as a matter of fact there are to-day no unmixed races, with the possible exception of the Japanese, who are as much of a puzzle ethnologically as they are in nearly everything else, and the great races, those that have dominated the world, have in their veins the blood of many peoples.1

1 "There are few unmixed languages in the world, as there are few unmixed races; but the one mixture does not at all determine the other, or measure it.

Luther Burbank, perhaps the world's foremost scientific plant breeder, in a magazine article written a few years ago, says:

In the course of many years of investigation into the plant life of the world, creating new forms, modifying old ones, adapting others to new conditions, and blending still others, I have constantly been impressed with the similarity between the organization and the development of plant and human life. While I have never lost sight of the principle of the survival of the fittest and all that it implies as an explanation of the development and progress of plant life, I have come to find in the crossing of species and in selection, wisely directed, a great and powerful instrument for the transformation of the vegetable kingdom along lines that lead constantly upward. The crossing of species is to me paramount. Upon it, wisely directed and accompanied by a rigid selection of the best and as rigid an exclusion of the poorest, rests the hope of all progress. The mere crossing of species, unaccompanied by selection, wise supervision, intelligent care, and the utmost patience, is not unlikely to result in marked good, and may result in vast harm. Unorganized effort is often most vicious in its tendencies.1

Mr. Burbank notes that in the year 1904, 752,864 immigrants came into the United States, assigned to more than fifty distinct nationalities.

The English is a very striking proof of this; the preponderating French-Latin element in our vocabulary gets its most familiar and indispensable part from the Normans, a Germanic race, who got it from the French, a Celtic race, who got it from the Italians, among whom the Latin-speaking community were at first a very insignificant element, numerically." Whitney: The Life and Growth of Language, p. 9.

1 The Century Magazine, New York, May, 1906.

Some of these immigrants [he says] will mate with others of their own class, notably the Jews, thus not markedly changing the current; many will unite with others of allied speech; still others marry into races wholly different from their own, while a far smaller number will perhaps find union with what we may call native stock.

But wait until two decades have passed, until there are children of age to wed, and then see, under the changed conditions, how widespread will be the mingling. So for many years the foreign nations have been pouring into this country and taking their part in the vast blending. In my work with plants and flowers I introduce color here, shape there, size or perfume, according to the product desired. In such processes the teachings of Nature are followed. Its great forces only are employed. All that has been done for plants and flowers by crossing, Nature has already accomplished for the American people. By the crossings of types, strength has in one instance been secured; in another, intellectuality; in still another, moral force. Nature alone could do this. The work of man's head and hands has not yet been summoned to prescribe for the development of a race. So far a preconceived and mapped-out crossing of bloods finds no place in the making of peoples and nations. But when Nature has already done its duty, and the crossing leaves a product which in the rough displays the best human attributes, all that is left to be done falls to selective environment.

Mr. Burbank closes an extremely suggestive and instructive article in these pertinent words:

Whenever you have a nation is which there is no variation, there is comparatively little insanity or crime, or

exalted morality or genius. Here in America, where the variation is greatest, statistics show a greater percentage of all these variations.

As time goes on its endless and ceaseless course, environment must crystallize the American Nation; its varying elements will become unified, and the weedingout process will, by the means indicated in this paper, by selection and environmental influences, leave the finest human product ever known. The transcendent qualities which are placed in plants will have their analogies in the noble composite, the American of the future.

This is the dictum of the scientist. Here is proof offered by the practical observer, and there is nothing more practical in America than its newspapers:

Two years ago in Fall River, Pawtucket, Lowell, Lawrence, and other smaller manufacturing centres, on Saturday afternoons, Sundays, and holidays, it was a sight to watch the crowds, -not a few, but hundreds, in their native dress, representing about every nation under the sun. Very little of the conversation was understood by the American mixing in the crowd. To-day the foreigner in native dress is comparatively a rare sight, as they are so much Americanized by contact with native help in the mills, by the instruction and advice of their overseers and second-hands, that they are good spenders for American clothing, and each year finds them living in better style and in better localities, and many are already property owners, which means they have come to stay.1

1 Quoted by the Springfield, Massachusetts, Republican, August 12, 1909, from the American Wool and Cotton Reporter.

The writer of this article notes that at first it was difficult to teach these foreigners. "They could be told nothing, as our language was entirely unknown, so that their early training was largely through motions and personal demonstration on the part of the department heads. But they came here to get money, and were reasonably willing and quick to learn, and to-day the growing mill population is of these people and their offspring, who will prove a fine class of help within a few years, as they reach the necessary age.

Only a person hopelessly blind or willfully prejudiced could deny the self-evident truth of the Americanization and nationalization of the immi

grant.

Mr. Bryce, with his penetrating insight into American sociology, was impressed with the uniformity of American life,' this uniformity seeming to him to be almost monotonous in its reproduction of a fixed type, so little did he find Americans of East or West to differ from one another, so well established are the characteristics of the American, with such fidelity are the habits and customs in one part of the country reproduced in another. Could there be any stronger testimony that there exists. an American Nation, that the people are as one in all the essential things that go to make a Nation? If there were men of diverse race and nationalities living under a common political system which had 1 Bryce: The American Commonwealth, vol. 11, chap. cxvi, passim.