586 MIGRATIONS OF RACES OF MEN CONSIDERED HISTORICALLY. 



it destroys the old ones. The Crown is allowed to create one new Irish 

 peerage for every three that die out. Nature uses her prerogative far 

 more sparingly; she does not produce a new type for ten that vanish. 

 Since the nations of modern Europe took their present distinct charac- 

 ters with their languages and their local seats between the sixth and 

 the eleventh centuries, no new nation has appeared in Eurojie, nor is 

 there now the least likelihood that any will. Neither has the settle- 

 ment of European man in the New World wrought any marked changes 

 in national t^q^es even when there has been a blood-mingling on a great 

 scale. The average Mexican, who is by extraction more than half an 

 Indian, is for most practical purposes, religious, social, and ethical, a 

 Spaniard. The man of Pennsylvania or Ohio is still more palpably an 

 Englishman, nor does the immense infusion of Irish and German blood 

 seem likely to affect the Anglo-American type as it tixed itself a cen- 

 tury ago. Nothing shows more clearly the strength which a well-estab- 

 lished racial character has than the fact that the climatic and economic 

 conditions of America have so little altered the English settlers in 

 body, so comparatively little even in mind. Nothing better illustrates 

 the assimilative power of a vigorous community than the way in which 

 the immigrants into the United States melt like sugar in a cup of tea, 

 and see their children grow up no longer Germans or Norwegians, or 

 even Irish or Italians or Czechs, but Anglo-Americans. With the 

 negroes, on the other hand, there is practically no admixture; and so 

 far as can be foreseen they will remain, at least in the sub-tropical i)arts 

 of the South, distinctly African in their physical and mental character- 

 istics for centuries to come. The same remark holds true of the white 

 and black races in South Africa, wiiere the process of blood mixture, 

 which w^ent on to some extent between the Dutch and the Hottentots, 

 has all but stopped. 



Will this i)rocess of extinguishing and assimilating the weaker 

 nationalities and their types of culture continue into a distant future? 

 Have those movements of population which have been hitiierto so 

 powerful a factor in that process nearly reached their limit? Since a 

 time long before the dawn of history the various races seem to have 

 been always in an unstable equilibrium, some constantly pressing ui>oii 

 others, or seeking to escape from crowded into vacant, from cold or 

 sterile into more genial or more fertile, lands. Is the time near at hand 

 when they will have settled down in a permanent fashion, just as our 

 globe itself has from a gaseous state solidified by the combination of 

 its elements into its present stable form ? 



Over large parts of the earth this time seems already within a 

 measurable distance. Nearly all of the north temperate zone, except 

 parts of southwestern and southeastern Siberia (especially along the 

 lower Amour), and parts of Western Canada, is now occupied, and 

 most of it pretty thickly occupied. Districts there are which may be 

 more closely packed: the Western United States, for instance, though 



