586 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



IMMIGEATION AND THE FUTURE AMEEICAN EACE 



By Dr. ALBERT ALLEMANN 



AKMY MEDICAL MUSEUM, WASHINGTON, D. C. 



THE people of the thirteen colonies, the builders of the American 

 Union, were almost exclusively of the Anglo-Saxon race. The 

 immigration which set in after the war of independence and continued 

 during the greater part of the nineteenth century, was composed of 

 people not dissimilar from those early colonists. They came from the 

 British Isles, Scandinavia, Germany and the smaller Teutonic countries. 

 But during the last twenty-five years the number of immigrants from 

 those regions has steadily decreased and has now sunk to very small 

 numbers, while the immigration from Italy, Hungary, Greece and 

 Eussia has increased from year to year during the same period of time, 

 and, of late years, has assumed truly enormous proportions. Thus 

 while the earlier immigrants were of a reasonably homogeneous race, 

 almost entirely of Anglo-Saxon or Teutonic origin, just enough leav- 

 ened with Celtic elements to quicken the phlegmatic pulse of that cold 

 northern race, the majority of the immigrants that landed on our 

 shores during the last quarter of a century, are quite dissimilar in their 

 origin, language, customs and religion from the original settlers of the 

 American Union. 



It is claimed by some writers that all these various races, which are 

 now forming the population of the United States, will, in the course of 

 time, fuse together and produce a new and superior type of people. 

 Other writers go still farther ; they assert that the immense numbers of 

 this later immigration will overwhelm this country and, in the course 

 of a few generations, supplant the original stock of Anglo-Saxon and 

 Teutonic settlers. 1 Both these views are erroneous. It is impossible, 

 as we shall see, that a general intermixture throughout this mighty 

 empire can take place, much less will the later immigrants be able to 

 supplant the descendants of those sturdy pioneers who first settled the 

 vast prairies and fertile valleys of this great republic. 



There are so many and so varied types among these later immi- 

 grants, and they are generally so much inferior to the native American 



1 " The awful tragedy, forever repeating itself, of hero nations building 

 lordly palaces in which servant races will some day pitch their gipsy camps, 

 will also set in in America, and the descendants of the sturdy Old English and 

 Teutonic pioneers, a race that is said to possess the finest long-heads and the 

 heaviest brains, will have only worked for Magyars, Slavs, Italians and Negroes." 

 Kraus, Polit.-Anthrop. Rev., Leipz., 1906-7, V., 695. 



