Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 84.djvu/406

402 4 cities ought to suffice to throw light on a number of important questions.

The truth of the matter is that all the stocks that have come into America in recent years since 1830 have been very inferior to those already here in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; and in general they have been getting worse and worse. There have been a few notable exceptions, but broadly speaking all our very capable men of the present day have been engendered from the Anglo-Saxon element already here before the beginning of the nineteenth century. We sometimes read magazines and newspaper articles about the Irish in America, the Germans in America, the French in America, the Jews in America, describing the achievements of distinguished foreigners who have risen to high esteem and publishing portraits of the same. It is because they are relatively few that it is possible to make a magazine article out of the material. Who ever saw a similar article on the English in America? The statistically true can be exciting only to the scientifically inclined.

We have heard a great deal about the Melting-Pot, but no one as far as I know has brought forward any proof that there is a Melting-Pot in true biological sense, i, e., that there is any genuine mingling of blood sufficient to overcome the natural tendency that all species and varieties have to grow apart and become more dissimilar in course of time. If there had been a thorough mingling of the races in this country, there would have already been a decline in natural ability, but the tendency of like to mate with like, the natural tendency of the most successful to mate among themselves, works in the opposite direction. The real strength of a country is so dependent on the qualities of its leaders that it behooves patriots, sociologists and philosophers to take all these questions into account and consider more carefully the genesis and significance of that small fraction of one per cent, which represents the intellectual crust.