Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 20.djvu/746

724 we may expect to find among them a different civilization, based upon different mental characters and temperament. If their customs, laws, and government have remained the same from a remote antiquity, we may expect to find them so persistent as to resist all effort at change; and we may find forms, which were anciently of great benefit, still transmitted by inheritance, though they may now have become injurious by interfering with the introduction of new forms of greater utility. These expectations, as will hereafter appear, are fully justified by the facts.

As nations are the necessary product of their parts—as the government is as it is because the people are as they are—it follows that a certain degree of homogeneity is necessary to secure peace and permanence. A majority of the people must have sentiments, instincts, and temperaments, as nearly similar as possible, where a difference in circumstances, occupations, and position is necessary. It is a constant strain upon the coherence of a nation, where the parts are of different civilizations. This would in fact be opposed to the very idea of a nation. As defined by Bagehot, "a nation means a like body of men, because of that likeness capable of acting together, and because of that likeness inclined to obey similar rules." A nation may, like the United States, be composed of parts of various other nations, but they must be of a common race and civilization. The history of the Indians and the negroes in America too plainly demonstrates the truth that, where the races are different and the societies have different civilizations, rapid assimilation is impossible. As long as such a difference exists there will be a conflict, which can be ended only by the slow process of assimilation by variation of race, or by the extermination of the weaker. The permanence of national structure can be maintained only by the homogeneity of its civilization. "So long," says Spencer, "as the characters of the citizens remain unchanged, there can be no substantial change in the political organization which has slowly evolved from them." Conversely, it follows that, upon the introduction of inharmonious foreign elements, the society must be proportionately modified. The introduction of the Chinese into our American society would be a union of different civilizations and different races. Each would stand by itself, from being too different to appreciate the other. They would be united only in the common interests of protection to life and property, and would defeat those primary objects by differing so fundamentally as to the method of their accomplishment. Very little assimilation could take place, and, by the law of heredity, the newer institutions would be the more readily changed, the older and more deeply rooted would be the more persistent. If the immigration should be so small—though there are reasons for believing it would not be—that the American population would always be in a large