Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/415

Rh, however, that the application of this principle should have almost escaped the attention of every writer upon this subject, or been lightly passed over by them. Mr. Giddings, whose work on sociology is the only one based upon American inductions, scarcely notices it; and his associate, Mr. Mayo-Smith, while he has examined the subject of immigration extensively, appears to have entirely overlooked the real value of the foreign element.

It is in the purely American commonwealths that civilization is to-day the lowest; the coast States, from Virginia to Louisiana, have a foreign population of only 1.61 per cent, yet it is here that the illiteracy is greatest, and that there is least commercial and industrial progress. It is this section, too, which produces the clay-eater and "cracker," native-born white American citizens, yet so degraded that continental Europe can scarcely show a lower type of man. It was the solid American vote of the South which at the late election was cast for Bryanism, repudiation, social upheaval, and all else that that name implies. North Carolina, which does not contain within its borders a single town having a population in excess of twenty-five thousand persons, has the highest degree of illiteracy among its white inhabitants, and the smallest proportion of foreign population of any State in the Union. Lest it should be imagined, however, that it is the alien which has the effect of reducing the aggregate illiteracy in the Northern and Western States, it may be remarked that the percentage of illiteracy is almost invariably higher among the foreign than among the native element.

It has already been pointed out that it was the civil war and slavery which in part caused a regression in Southern civilization of at least a quarter of a century, but it will be found that this misfortune was closely associated with the homogeneousness of the people and the absence of a foreign element. In 1884 the Southern Immigration Society met at Nashville. In the report of its proceedings appeared this significant statement: "The immigration movement is to be the great revolutionary movement in the political economy of the South." The society has probably ceased to exist, but these words have lived and borne fruit. There is to-day a movement toward the South, partially from abroad, more from the North, but introducing at least a new element—not very great, perhaps, yet still perceptible, not only in a changing population, but also in results, in a revival of industry, in a decrease of illiteracy.

Louisiana stands alone; already a well-established colony possessed of a high degree of civilization borrowed from France when acquired by the United States, there exist so many different factors