mportance of the kind of homogeneity that individuals of the same
nationality exhibit have been greatly exaggerated. Neither interbreeding
nor interaction has created, in what the French term "nationals," a more
than superficial likeness or like-mindedness. Racial differences have,
to be sure, disappeared or been obscured, but individual differences
remain. Individual differences, again, have been intensified by
education, personal competition, and the division of labor, until
individual members of cosmopolitan groups probably represent greater
variations in disposition, temperament, and mental capacity than those
which distinguished the more homogeneous races and peoples of an earlier
civilization.

What then, precisely, is the nature of the homogeneity which
characterizes cosmopolitan groups?

The growth of modern states exhibits the progressive merging of smaller,
mutually exclusive, into larger and more inclusive, social groups. This
result has been achieved in various ways, but it has usually been
followed or accompanied by a more or less complete adoption by the
members of the smaller groups of the language, technique, and mores of
the larger and more inclusive ones. The immigrant readily takes over the
language, manners, the social ritual, and outward forms of his adopted
country. In America it has become proverbial that a Pole, Lithuanian, or
Norwegian cannot be distinguished, in the second generation, from an
American born of native parents.

There is no reason to assume that this assimilation of alien groups to
native standards has modified to any great extent fundamental racial
characteristics. It has, however, erased the external signs which
formerly distinguished the members of one race from those of another.

On the other hand, the breaking up of the isolation of smaller groups
has had the effect of emancipating the individual man, giving him room
and freedom for the expansion and development of his individual
aptitudes.

What one actually finds in cosmopolitan groups, then, is a superficial
uniformity, a homogeneity in manners and fashion, associated with
relatively profound differences in individual opinions, sentiments, and
beliefs. This is just the reverse of what one meets among primitive
peoples, where diversity in external forms, as between different groups,
is accompanied by a monotonous sameness in the mental attitudes of
individuals. There is a striking similarity in the sentiments and menta