teadily
increasing in volume, and of which the fountain-head is so inexhaustible
as to appal the imagination. From the beginning of the century, the
inflow averaged little less than a million a year, and while about
one-fifth of this represented a temporary migration, four-fifths of it
meant a permanent addition to the population of the New World.

The character of this stream will inevitably determine to a large extent
the future of the American nation. The direct biological results, in
race mixture, are important enough, although not easy to define. The
indirect results, which are probably of no less importance to eugenics,
are so hard to follow that some students of the problem do not even
realize their existence.

The ancestors of all white Americans, of course, were immigrants not so
very many generations ago. But the earlier immigration was relatively
homogeneous and stringently selected by the dangers of the voyage, the
hardships of life in a new country, and the equality of opportunity
where free competition drove the unfit to the wall. There were few
people of eminence in the families that came to colonize North America,
but there was a high average of sturdy virtues, and a good deal of
ability, particularly in the Puritan and Huguenot invasions and in a
part of that of Virginia.

In the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century, the number of
these "patriots and founders" was greatly increased by the arrival of
immigrants of similar racial stocks from Ireland, Germany, Scandinavia,
and to a less extent from the other countries of northern and western
Europe. These arrivals added strength to the United States, particularly
as a large part of them settled on farms.

This stream of immigration gradually dried up, but was succeeded by a
flood from a new source,--southern and eastern Europe. Italians, Slavs,
Poles, Magyars, East European Hebrews, Finns, Portuguese, Greeks,
Roumanians and representatives of many other small nationalities began
to seek fortunes in America. The earlier immigration had been made up
largely of those who sought escape from religious or political tyranny
and came to settle permanent homes. The newer immigration was made up,
on the whole, of those who frankly sought wealth. The difference in the
reason for coming could not fail to mean a difference in selection of
the immigrants, quite apart from the change in the races.

Last of all began an immigration of Levantines, of Syrians