Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 5.djvu/506

482 give its population at large an Anglo-Saxon or Germanic character! Opportunity has not been lacking. India, long under British rule, shows in a population of 300,000,000 hardly more than 200,000 Englishmen, many of whom are in the employ of the Government, and very few of permanent residence. The Hawaiian Islands, having of tropical climates probably the best, and having invited American immigration for many years, have, in a population of over 100,000, hardly more than 3000 Americans. It is true, some persons of Germanic blood will go to the tropics some merchants and their employees to found or run mercantile establishments; some planters to work their lands with men belonging to other races; some speculators in mines or railroads; some professional men and some mechanics and small tradesmen—most of them hoping to make money quickly, and then to go home again. But the number of such people is comparatively very small. They may improve economic and social conditions somewhat in and around the places where they go, but they will not change the general character and the political capabilities of the population at large in any essential degree.

In order to bring about important changes in that respect by immigration, it must be immigration in mass; and people of Germanic blood will not immigrate in mass to the tropics. The bulk of the population, that is, the decisive element in democratic government, consists everywhere of the laboring people; and all efforts to get men of Germanic blood to become the bulk, or even a large part, of the laboring force of any tropical country, have utterly failed. It is not only the low rate of wages prevailing there that repels them, but the climatic conditions which cannot be changed. I do not mean here particular diseases, like the yellow-fever, which may be combated, but the generally enervating effect of the