ferent character from that which he once possessed. He is now distinguished by a beautiful symmetry of form, of which he could not once boast, and he has even superior speed to that which he formerly exhibited. He is no longer used to struggle with deer, but contends with his fellows over a shorter and speedier course.' An able writer believes that our English greyhounds are the descendants, progressively improved [Darwin's italics], of the large rough greyhounds which existed in Scotland so early as the third century.' It would be wearisome to continue to cite the authorities, for it is no longer open to dispute that animals are the product of their environment and the conditions under which they live, those conditions being food, climate, and natural selection. If animals are subject to an universal law, is there any reason for believing that man alone of the animal kingdom can escape its influence?

In the first volume I said 2 that the constant effort of breeders of stock and of floriculturists is to improve the breed or the flower by crossing it with a strain the product of a different environment, or to graft on it a growth that has its own peculiarities of soil and climate. "Here we see the recognition of the fundamental law that in the animal and vegetable kingdoms what corresponds to character in man in animals and fruits and flowers, structure, size, color is the result of environment.' 2 See page 55.

1 Darwin: Op. cit., pp. 42-43.

Carrying out that analogy, we find warrant for the assertion that the Americans are a "new" race. It might perhaps have been considered more correct, but it would have been decidedly more cumbersome and offensive to literary taste, and would not have conveyed the exact shade of meaning, to have described Americans as an "unlike" race, that is unlike the English, the French, or the Germans; unlike any other modern European nation from which they are descended or whose blood has mingled with theirs. But a thing unlike that with which it is compared is dissimilar or diverse or bears no resemblance; therefore, it is different and "new." The American people are not entirely without resemblance to the English and other European races, but they have developed characteristics that differentiate them mentally from the races of Europe, and in that sense they are "new.”

It is curious, the reluctance of Americans to admit that they have a psychology which sets them apart from the rest of the world and has given them their distinguishing traits. Thus in a sympathetic review1 of the first volume of this work, the reviewer says that the book "comprises nothing less than an attempt to elucidate the psychology of the American people. Most of us would be inclined at the outset, perhaps, to pronounce such a task impossible of accomplishment. The psychology of any mass of eighty or ninety millions of men and women is 1 The Dial, Chicago, April 16, 1910.

an extremely elusive thing; and furthermore, the people of America represent a conglomeration of racial elements such as would seem scarcely to admit of anything in the nature of composite characterization." This hesitation, this extreme modesty to deny a nation the possession of that which every nation has claimed as one of the elements without which there can be no vigorous nationality, is a thing extremely difficult for a foreigner to understand. No Englishman, no Frenchman, no German would deny that his people have a national psychology; in fact, he would resent the assertion as an insult to his nationality, but the American seems to take pride in the deficiency. I shall endeavor to prove in subsequent pages that the "conglomeration of racial elements" scientifically admit "of composite characterization." It is an American habit, largely reinforced by foreign criticism, to think of the American people as a "conglomeration," the modern tower of Babel, a hodge-podge of races, each of which, while part of a social and political entity, still remains alien, still preserves its mother-language, still remains foreign to its environment, and is uninfluenced by political and social forces; as if America were simply a convention hall for an international gathering, the delegates brought together for a common purpose, but permitted to address the meeting in their own tongues, making no concessions to their hosts in dress or thought or expression, elbow to elbow for the mo

ment but unchanged by association, and, despite their common purpose, at heart antagonistic and resolved not to yield to "foreign" influence. Americans who labor under this delusion forget the cementing effect of language, -for there is only one language spoken in the United States, political loyalty, and social institutions. Yet these are the forces to assimilate the peoples of many races and to transform them, physically and mentally, and to make "of them a people essentially one without waiting for the slow process of amalgamation by the mingling of the blood at all," 1 and thus to produce a national psychology.

1

Probably my conclusions as to the effect of immigration on the psychology of the American, which are set forth at some length in the present volume, will be criticized because they are opposed to views of other writers. It is unnecessary to forestall what will be found in subsequent pages. It seems sufficient to say that as I have been unable to discover in early American institutions any trace of any influence other than English, so now I have been equally unable to find that the character of the mind or the ethical concept of the American has been affected by the non-English immigration of the nineteenth century. Those mental characteristics and the socialized code which all the world recognizes as peculiarly American, and which have given the American a distinct individuality, are, in one

word, American. Their genesis was in American soil when the Colonial ceased to exist and the American came into being; and as his civilization has developed, so his character has become fixed and the type has been permanently established. The American has an extraordinary and only partially explained power of absorbing alien people into his social and political system, and yet remaining uninfluenced by them. Germans become "GermanAmericans" and then Americans, but the millions of Germans who have poured into the country have not succeeded in making a single American an "American-German." It is this power of the American to assimilate and not to be assimilated, to influence but to remain uninfluenced, to stamp his individuality upon the alien and not to lose his own individuality, that has incorporated the immigrant into the American without affecting the fundamental ideas of America or its political principles; and has so insensibly affected the mind or philosophy, morals or point of view, artistic development or literary taste of the American. In some other respects, economic especially, the influence of the immigrant has been very great, but more need not be said here, as the subject is treated fully in its proper place.