Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/98

90, but they all contain the fundamental ideas of American liberty. This influence of physical environment still goes on, and in subduing the wilderness the pioneer abandons the habits of the Old World and takes up those of the New. Thus the continent forced the conditions of its conquest.

Herbert Spencer, in his Principles of Sociology, states that the earlier development was at the mercy of the physical environment, while civilized man has reduced Nature to subjection. As society progresses, new factors come in to modify the physical organization, which Spencer calls the super-environment or social environment. Spencer claims that the social environment is more powerful than the physical environment. The men who settled this country had a social history behind them, and the institutions that they brought here greatly influenced their children. What I said in regard to the physical environment may also be said of the social environment. The immigrants did not come in bands, but individually, and the social environment had full play. During the colonial period the immigrants were chiefly English, and the English stamp was upon the institutions which they planted here. So it has not been a mingling of institutions, but foreigners have assimilated the institutions already established here.

One of the chief influences of the social environment is education. This is very important, as so many ignorant come. It is important to know how receptive these people are to our institutions. This will depend upon their power to learn our language, and upon the standard of intelligence of the native country. Out of the 15,000,000 foreigners who landed here between 1820 and 1850, forty per cent came from English countries. This proportion is growing less, as in 1891 only twenty-two per cent came from English countries, while from all German countries the proportion is thirty-one per cent. A new difficulty may arise here, in that people of other languages may now find communities where their own language is spoken; but this can hardly be urged as an objection, for, in the case of the German immigrants, they come from a country with a high standard of education. We depend upon our school system to reach the immigrants and prepare them for citizenship. The parents can not be reached by the schools directly, so the system must exert its influence upon the children of the immigrants. The eleventh census shows that the foreign-born element of school age between five and seventeen years is 900,000. The second generation, or native born of foreign parents, is 12,400,000, and the number of immigrants foreign born above seventeen years is 8,332,000. This shows that the problem is very favorable, as, for every hundred who can not come under the influence of our schools, there are one hundred