Spread of English-Speaking Peoples 35 



of language has accompanied the second wandering 

 of our people, from Britain to America, as it ac- 

 companied their first, from Germany to Britain, is 

 due to the further fact that when the second wan- 

 dering took place the race possessed a fixed literary 

 language, and, thanks to the ease of communication, 

 was kept in touch with the parent stock. The 

 change of blood was probably as great in one case 

 as in the other. The modern Englishman is de- 

 scended from a Low-Dutch stock, which, when it 

 went to Britain, received into itself an enormous in- 

 fusion of Celtic, a much smaller infusion of Norse 

 and Danish, and also a certain infusion of Norman- 

 French blood. When this new English stock came 

 to America it mingled with and absorbed into itself 

 immigrants from many European lands, and the 

 process has gone on ever since. It is to be noted 

 that, of the new blood thus acquired, the greatest 

 proportion has come from Dutch and German 

 sources, and the next greatest from Irish, while the 

 Scandinavian element comes third, and the only 

 other of much consequence is French Huguenot. 

 Thus it appears that no new element of importance 

 has been added to the blood. Additions have been 

 made to the elemental race-strains in much the 

 same proportion as these were originally combined. 

 Some latter-day writers deplore the enormous 

 immigration to our shores as making us a hetero- 

 geneous instead of a homogeneous people; but as a 

 matter of fact we are less heterogeneous at the pres- 

 ent day than we were at the outbreak of the Revo- 



