is that they do these things at
all--that the legislators, whether Federal or State, and the members of
the consular service, appointed or elected as they are, and from the
classes which they represent, do somehow manage to form legislative
bodies which, year in and year out, will bear comparison well enough
with other Parliaments, and do in one way and another succeed in giving
their country a service abroad which is far from despicable as compared
with that of other peoples, nor all devoid of dignity. The fact that
results are not immeasurably worse than they are is no small tribute to
the adaptability of the American character. There is no other national
character which could stand the same test.

In the absence of any especially trained or officially dedicated class,
the American people in the mass provides an amazing quantity of not
impossible material out of which legislators and consuls may be
made--just as it might equally well be made into whatever should happen
to be required.

And this fact strikes at the root of a common misapprehension in the
minds of foreigners as to the constitution of the American people, a
misapprehension which is fostered by what is written by other foreigners
after inadequate observation.

Much is thus written of the so-called heterogeneousness of the people of
America. The Englishman who visits the United States for a few weeks
only, commonly comes away with an idea that the New Yorker is the
American people; whereas we have seen why it is that good American
authorities maintain that in all the width and depth of the continent
there is no aggregation of persons so little representative of the
American people as a whole as the inhabitants of New York. After the
Englishman has been in the United States for some months or a year or
two, he grows bewildered and reaches the conclusion that there is no
common American type--nothing but a patchwork of unassimilated units. In
which conclusion he is just as mistaken as he was at first. There does
exist a clearly defined and homogeneous American type.

Let us suppose that all the negroes had been swept as with some vast net
down and away into the Gulf of Mexico; that the Irishmen had been
gathered out of the cities and deposited back into the Atlantic; that
the Germans had been rounded up towards their fellows in Chicago and
Milwaukee and then tipped gently into Lake Michigan, while the
Scandinavians, having been assembled in Minnesota, h