Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/412

396 proportion of females to males among the foreign than among the native element. Havelock Ellis, too, has observed that the criminal instinct manifests itself with much greater frequency in the Irish woman in Great Britain than when at home, and suggests that it is due to a removal of domestic influence; his theory may perhaps be accepted as a partial explanation of a like phenomenon in this country. It is a well-recognized sociological fact that crime is much more prevalent where large aggregations of men are herded together than in the country districts, and this also must be considered in correlation with the further fact already noted that the alien population is much more largely urban than the native.

Mr. S. G. Fisher, in his work, The Making of Pennsylvania, says: "As shown by statistics, the Germans in America, in proportion to their numbers, have produced fewer remarkable and prominent men than any other division of the people. The race itself is not deficient, but when it isolates itself in an American community, it is cut off from the best development of that community, and also from its old associates in Europe, and inevitably deteriorates." Elsewhere he remarks that they are difficult of assimilation. That these statements are in part well founded may not be questioned. And with the increasing homogeneity of a people a deterioration, or at least a check to advancement, must inevitably follow, as I have already pointed out in the case of the South. But we have rid ourselves of the notion that great men make history; great men may hasten or retard a movement, but it is the larger, invincible force of popular will which to-day moves the political and social world; which has always moved it, and always will move it. It took the peasantry of Europe ten centuries to shake off the thrall of serfdom. In the eighth century no man, however great, could have freed the serfs; in the fourteenth, no man, however great, could have restrained the flow of liberalizing sentiment. The mills of God may grind slowly, and also exceedingly small; but "with patience he stands waiting, with exactness grinds he all."

The Germans form one of the best elements in the American community; clannish they may be, given to herding together, and yet, although frequently on the surface Germans even to the second and third generation, retaining forms and ceremonials of the fatherland, they are, in fact, readily assimilable. They become assimilated through American influence, newspapers, literature, society, business, and in the second generation through American birth and education, and become true Americans at heart. Their love for the fatherland has been transferred in even greater intensity to their foster land.

I have already noted the fact that the largest proportion of our