EUROPEANS IN UNITED STATES—RIPLEY. 598 
per cent of the population of the former State were natives of Kansas. 
An analysis of the membership of its state legislature some years ago 
revealed that only 9 per cent were born within the confines of the 
State. Even in the staid commonwealth of Iowa, only about one- 
third of the American-born population was native to the State. 
This restlessness has always been characteristic of our original stock. 
Even our farmers, in other countries more or less yoked to the soil, 
are still on the move, traveling first westward, and now southward, 
seeking new outlets for their activities. And from this rural class 
is also drawn the steady inflow to the great cities and industrial 
centers, which is so much a feature of our time. Thus has rural 
New England been depopulated, leaving almost whole counties in 
which the inhabitants to-day number less than in 1800. In this 
process during the ten years prior to 1890 the little State of Vermont 
parted with more than one-half of her population by emigration. 
Maine sent forth one-third. And other States as far south as 
Virginia and Ohio parted with almost as many. It has been esti- 
mated even of the city of Boston, an industrial center of over half a 
million inhabitants, that the old, native-born Bostonians of twenty 
years ago number less than 64,000. At first our immigrants do not 
feel the full measure of this restlessness. The great inflowing streams 
of human beings at New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, like rivers 
reaching the ocean, tend to deposit their sediment at once on touching 
our shores. At the outset these immigrants are immobile elements, 
congesting the slums of the great cities. But with the men par- 
ticularly, with the exception of the Jews perhaps, the end is not there. 
As among the Italians, Greeks, and Scandinavians, they are apt to 
return to the fatherland after awhile, and then to come back again, 
this time with a wider appreciation of their opportunities, so that 
when they return they scatter far more widely. Instead of bunching 
near the steamship landing stages they range afield. With their 
children this mobility may become even more marked. Cheap rail- 
road fares, the demand for harvest labor in the West, the contract 
labor on railways and irrigation works, all tend to stimulate this 
movement. It was this mobility of our older Anglo-Saxon popula- 
tion which kept the nation unified over a vast and highly varied area; 
and it will be such mobility, engendered by the exigencies of our 
changing economic life, which will help to stir up and mix together 
the various ingredients of our population. 
A second influence, making for racial intermixture, is the ever 
present inequality of the sexes among these foreigners. This is 
most apparent when they first arrive, about 70 per cent of them 
being males. Few nationalities nowadays bring whole families as 
did the Anglo-Saxon and German people a generation ago. The 
Bohemians, indeed, seem to do so, as well as many of those immi- 
