far less
difficulty in filling up the depleted ranks of its armies. But to
leave so large a portion of the actual population as the foreign born
residing in the country without the rights of citizens, would have been
a far graver evil, and would, in the late struggle, have given the
victory to secession. There are great national advantages derived from
the migration hither of foreign labor, and if the migration be
encouraged or permitted, naturalization on easy and liberal terms is
the wisest, the best, and only safe policy. The children of
foreign-born parents are real Americans.

Emigration has, also, a singular effect in developing the latent powers
of the emigrant, and the children of emigrants are usually more active,
more energetic than the children of the older inhabitants of the
country among whom they settle. Some of our first men in civil life
have been sons of foreign-born parents, and so are not a few of our
greatest and most successful generals. The most successful of our
merchants have been foreign-born. The same thing has been noticed
elsewhere, especially in the emigration of the French Huguenots to
Holland, Germany, England, and Ireland. The immigration of so many
millions from the Old World has, no doubt, given to the American people
much of their bold, energetic, and adventurous character, and made them
a superior people on the whole to what they would otherwise have been.
This has nothing to do with superiority or inferiority of race or
blood, but is a natural effect of breaking men away from routine, and
throwing them back on their own individual energies and personal
resources.

Resistance is offered to negro suffrage, and justly too, till the
recently emancipated slaves have served an apprenticeship to freedom;
but that resistance cannot long stand before the onward progress of
American democracy, which asserts equal rights for all, and not for a
race or class only. Some would confine suffrage to landholders, or, at
least, to property-holders; but that is inconsistent with the American
idea, and is a relic of the barbaric constitution which founds power on
private instead of public wealth. Nor are property-owners a whit more
likely to vote for the public good than are those who own no property
but their own labor. The men of wealth, the business men,
manufacturers and merchants, bankers and brokers, are the men who exert
the worst influence on government in every country, for they alwa