t as everything else American--is to be brought about by a
combination of all the best characteristics of the different European
races, and the elimination, by some strange alchemy, of all their
undesirable traits--for even a good American will admit that European
races, now and then, have some undesirable traits when they first come
over. It is a beautiful, a hopeful, and to the eye of faith, a thrilling
prospect. The defect of the argument, however, lies in the
incompleteness of the premises, and its obliviousness of certain facts
of human nature and human history.

Before putting forward any theory upon the subject, it may be well
enough to remark that recent scientific research has swept away many
hoary anthropological fallacies. It has been demonstrated that the shape
or size of the head has little or nothing to do with the civilization or
average intelligence of a race; that language, so recently lauded as an
infallible test of racial origin is of absolutely no value in this
connection, its distribution being dependent upon other conditions than
race. Even color, upon which the social structure of the United States
is so largely based, has been proved no test of race. The conception of
a pure Aryan, Indo-European race has been abandoned in scientific
circles, and the secret of the progress of Europe has been found in
racial heterogeneity, rather than in racial purity. The theory that the
Jews are a pure race has been exploded, and their peculiar type
explained upon a different and much more satisfactory hypothesis. To
illustrate the change of opinion and the growth of liberality in
scientific circles, imagine the reception which would have been accorded
to this proposition, if laid down by an American writer fifty or sixty
years ago: "The European races, as a whole, show signs of a secondary or
derived origin; certain characteristics, especially the texture of the
hair, lead us to class them as intermediate between the extreme primary
types of the Asiatic and Negro races respectively." This is put forward
by the author, not as a mere hypothesis, but as a proposition fairly
susceptible of proof, and is supported by an elaborate argument based
upon microscopical comparisons, to which numerous authorities are cited.
If this fact be borne in mind it will simplify in some degree our
conception of a future American ethnic type.

By modern research the unity of the human race has been proved (if it
needed any proof to t