Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/598

594 differ from the long-headed northern race, which occupies to-day the rural districts of the American Union. Not one of them has reached a high degree of civilization. They have not proved their capability of self-government. They are illiterate and differ in their religious beliefs, their languages and customs, from the Teutonic peoples. They are vivacious, restless, turbulent, and do not possess that respect for law and a well-regulated government which is inborn in the northern race. They bring rarely whole families with them. No process of selection is now at work as in former days. A modern sea voyage has not the dangers and terrors of earlier times. The better and best people stay now at home and only the lower classes emigrate. A mixture of these races with the earlier immigrants could not possibly produce a superior people, as we sometimes read in newspaper articles; it would vitiate and deteriorate the American race, and might prepare for this nation the fate of the Roman empire.

At the time when the immigrants from the south and east of Europe began to arrive in larger numbers on the American shore the vast tracts of public lands had, as we have seen, been occupied by the Anglo-Saxons and the other Teutonic peoples, mingled with considerable numbers of Celts. There were no large territories left where any great numbers of these newcomers could have settled. But these later immigrants are not agriculturally inclined; they would not settle in the country even if public lands were still accessible to them. They belong to the poorest classes, were mostly brought up in cities, and are not adapted to the cultivation of the soil. With the exception, perhaps, of the Poles an exceedingly small number of these later immigrants settle in the country. The Russian Jew is a city dweller; the Greek and the Syrian stay in the cities; the Hungarian and the Slav take to mining; the Italians who do not follow mining or railroading prefer the large cities. Ripley asserts that four fifths of our foreign-born citizens live in the twelve principal cities of the country. It is quite certain that the greater number of these are of the later immigration.

We have thus shown that the Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic stock,