the nation's march to the Pacific, the sequence to the era in which it
was engaged in occupying the free lands and exploiting the resources of
the West. When it had achieved this position among the nations of the
earth, the United States found itself confronted, also, with the need of
constitutional readjustment, arising from the relations of federal
government and territorial acquisitions. It was obliged to reconsider
questions of the rights of man and traditional American ideals of
liberty and democracy, in view of the task of government of other races
politically inexperienced and undeveloped.

If we turn to consider the effect upon American society and domestic
policy in these two decades of transition we are met with palpable
evidences of the invasion of the old pioneer democratic order. Obvious
among them is the effect of unprecedented immigration to supply the
mobile army of cheap labor for the centers of industrial life. In the
past ten years, beginning with 1900, over eight million immigrants have
arrived. The newcomers of the eight years since 1900 would, according to
a writer in 1908, "repopulate all the five older New England States as
they stand to-day; or, if properly disseminated over the newer parts of
the country they would serve to populate no less than nineteen states of
the Union as they stand." In 1907 "there were one and one-quarter
million arrivals. This number would entirely populate both New Hampshire
and Maine, two of our oldest States." "The arrivals of this one year
would found a State with more inhabitants than any one of twenty-one of
our other existing commonwealths which could be named." Not only has the
addition to the population from Europe been thus extraordinary, it has
come in increasing measure from southern and eastern Europe. For the
year 1907, Professor Ripley,[316:1] whom I am quoting, has redistributed
the incomers on the basis of physical type and finds that one-quarter of
them were of the Mediterranean race, one-quarter of the Slavic race,
one-eighth Jewish, and only one-sixth of the Alpine, and one-sixth of
the Teutonic. In 1882 Germans had come to the amount of 250,000; in 1907
they were replaced by 330,000 South Italians. Thus it is evident that
the ethnic elements of the United States have undergone startling
changes; and instead of spreading over the nation these immigrants have
concentrated especially in the cities and great industrial centers in
the past decade. The co