Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 2.djvu/114

94 may try to impart to them will evaporate into nothing under the hot rays of the tropical sun. How will you fit them into our political system? Have you thought of it?

It is said that our free institutions exhibit a wonderful power in blending and assimilating the most heterogeneous elements of population living under their beneficent influence. So they do. Under the influences of our northern clime we certainly find such effects produced. The most stubborn prejudices are melted, the most inveterate habits are gradually changed; the best faculties resting in the various races of men congregating here are drawn to light and developed, and finally those heterogeneous elements are fitted for the great duties and responsibilities of republican citizenship. You see, indeed, here a blending of races going on which, as its result, leaves one united American people; and I may say that here, upon our soil, I am not afraid of any foreign element that may come to share our fortunes with us, not even of the Chinese. What cannot rise to and with the general level will sink, but it cannot prevent the rising of the rest. Assimilation here, therefore, is assimilation upward.

But it must not be forgotten that Anglo-Saxon vigor stands here upon its own congenial ground; from the very atmosphere its energies receive their inspiration, and by the very necessity of things Anglo-Saxon vigor is here the absorbing element, the assimilating force.

But how is it in the American tropics? The Anglo-Saxon invading them meets there the mixed Latin, Indian and African races upon their own congenial ground. There they receive their characteristic inspirations from the atmosphere; there they develop their characteristic qualities under the influences of tropical nature; there they are the natural growth of the soil, and the Anglo-Saxon appearing as a mere exotic plant, they will not be