evailed in
1810-20 prevailed to 1900, the population, which would then have been a
purely native American one, would have amounted to a hundred
million--that is to say, to approximately nine million in excess of the
present total population. The new waves are for a time amazingly fecund,
and then comes a rapid fall in the birth-rate. The proportion of
colonial and early republican blood in the population is, therefore,
probably far smaller even than the figures I have quoted would suggest.

These accesses of new population have come in a series of waves, very
much as if successive reservoirs of surplus population in the Old World
had been tapped, drained and exhausted. First came the Irish and
Germans, then Central Europeans of various types, then Poland and
Western Russia began to pour out their teeming peoples, and more
particularly their Jews, Bohemia, the Slavonic states, Italy and Hungary
followed and the latest arrivals include great numbers of Levantines,
Armenians and other peoples from Asia Minor and the Balkan Peninsula.
The Hungarian immigrants have still a birth-rate of forty-six per
thousand, the highest birth-rate in the world.

A considerable proportion of the Mediterranean arrivals, it has to be
noted, and more especially the Italians, do not come to settle. They
work for a season or a few years, and then return to Italy. The rest
come to stay.

A vast proportion of these accessions to the American population since
1840 has, with the exception of the East European Jews, consisted of
peasantry, mainly or totally illiterate, accustomed to a low standard of
life and heavy bodily toil. For most of them the transfer to a new
country meant severance from the religious communion in which they had
been bred and from the servilities or subordinations to which they were
accustomed They brought little or no positive social tradition to the
synthesis to which they brought their blood and muscle.

The earlier German, English and Scandinavian incomers were drawn from a
somewhat higher social level, and were much more closely akin in habits
and faith to the earlier founders of the Republic.

Our inquiry is this: What social structure is this pool of mixed
humanity developing or likely to develop?

Sec. 2

If we compare any European nation with the American, we perceive at once
certain broad differences. The former, in comparison with the latter, is
evolved and organised; the latter, in comparison with the for