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18 making an American citizen, fully and thoroughly impregnated with American ideals to the exclusion of all others, our experience is that it requires at least three generations to eliminate what may be termed the "hyphen" in citizenship. Not in the first, nor in the second, and hardly in the third, generation, does the immigrant cease to be an Irish–American, or a French–American, or a German–American, or a Slavonic–American, or yet a Dago. Nevertheless, in process of time, those of the Caucasian race do and will become Americans. Ultimately their descendants will be free from the traditions and ideals, so to speak, ground in through centuries passed under other conditions. Not so the Ethiopian. In his case, we find ourselves confronted with a situation never contemplated in that era of political dreams and scriptural science in which our institutions received shape. Stated tersely and in plain language, so far as the African is concerned—the cause and, so to speak, the motive of the great struggle of 1861 to 1865—we recognize the presence in the body politic of a vast alien mass which does not assimilate and which cannot be absorbed. In other words, the melting-pot theory came in sharp contact with an ethnological fact, and the unexpected occurred. The problem of African servitude was solved after a fashion; but in place of it a race issue of most uncompromising character evolved itself.

A survivor of the generation which read "Uncle Tom's Cabin" as it week by week appeared,—fresh to-day from