men and women and many children, eating all manner of strange food
while they rest, and speaking all manner of strange tongues, carrying the
most uncouth shapeless boxes that trunk-maker of Bergen or Upsal can
devise--such queer oval red-and-green painted wooden cases, more like
boxes to hold musical instruments than for the Sunday kit of Hans or
Christian--clothing much soiled and worn by lower-deck lodgment and spray
of mid-Atlantic roller, and dust of that 1100 miles of railroad since
New York was left behind, but still with many traces, under dust and
seediness, of Scandinavian rustic fashion; altogether a homely people,
but destined ere long to lose every vestige of their old Norse habits
under the grindstone of the great mill they are now entering. That vast
human machine Which grinds Celt and Saxon, Teuton and Dane, Fin and Goth
into the same image and likeness of the inevitable Yankee--grinds him too
into that image in one short generation, and oftentimes in less; doing it
without any apparent outward pressure or any tyrannical law of language
or religion, but nevertheless beating out, welding, and amalgamating the
various conflicting races of the Old World into the great American
people. Assuredly the world has never witnessed any experiment of so
gigantic a nature as this immense fusion of the Caucasian race now going
on before our eyes in North America. One asks oneself, with feelings of
dread, what is to be the result? Is it to eliminate from the human race
the evil habits of each nationality, and to preserve in the new one the
noble characteristics of all? I say one asks the question with a feeling
of dread, for it is the question of the well-being, of the whole human
family of the future, the question of the advance or retrogression of the
human race. No man living can answer that question. Time alone can solve
it; but one thing is certain-so far the experiment bodes ill for success.
Too often the best and noblest attributes of the people wither and die
out by the process of transplanting. The German preserves inviolate his
love of lager, and leaves behind him his love of Fatherland. The Celt,
Scotch or Irish, appears to eliminate from his nature many of those
traits of humour of which their native lands are so pregnant. It may be
that this is only the beginning, that a national decomposition of the old
distinctions must occur before the new elements can arise, and that from
it all will come in the fulness o