IMMIGRATION AND THE AMERICAN RACE 587 



population, that such a mixture would not be desirable. Herbert 

 Spencer, Gobineau and others have pointed out that a mixture of 

 races, very dissimilar, produces an inferior type of people. History 

 bears out this view. The modern peoples that dwell in the Mediter- 

 ranean basin present to-day a greater mixture of dissimilar races than 

 any country on the globe, yet these regions, once the center of civiliza- 

 tion, have certainly not produced a superior type of humanity. If the 

 mixture of two races of equal vigor, energy and civilization, but very 

 dissimilar in their racial make-up, produces an inferior people, much 

 less can the fusion of several races, some of which are of a very inferior 

 civilization, produce a fair type of humanity. 2 It is the purpose of this 

 article to show that no general mixture of the original Anglo-Saxon 

 and Teutonic stock with the various heterogeneous elements of the 

 later immigration will take place. We shall see that these later arrivals 

 settle almost entirely in the large cities, and that they will there, in the 

 course of a few generations, be eliminated in the great struggle of 

 modern industrial and commercial life. But first we must get ac- 

 quainted with the history and character of the various races which form 

 the present population of the United States. 



Broadly speaking, we have two great classes of immigrants, those 

 that came before about the year 1885 and those that came after that 

 year. The native home of the former was northwestern Europe and 

 the bulk of them belongs to the so-called Teutonic, or Scandinavian, or 

 northern blond race ; the latter came from the Mediterranean basin and 

 eastern Europe, and present a number of racial types. 



The Scandinavian or Teutonic race was divided into a number of 

 barbarian tribes when the Bomans first made their acquaintance. 

 These tribes lived in Scandinavia, northern Germany and on the is- 

 lands of the Baltic Sea. Eull of vigor and countless in numbers, they 

 began to make invasions into the territories of the Roman Empire, and 

 though frequently defeated by Roman science and discipline, they never 

 gave up until, during the fifth century, they overran all the western 

 provinces of the great empire and founded new states and new nations 

 in the regions they conquered. All the modern nations of western 

 Europe are more or less a mixture of the original Celto-Roman in- 

 habitants with these northern conquerors; but as the latter were far 

 in the minority, the Teutonic blood has, in the course of many cen- 

 turies, been more or less eliminated; only the aristocracies of these 

 countries, avoiding intermarriage with the subject races, preserve to this 

 day the characteristics of their northern forefathers. This race exists 



2 Macchioro ascribes the decline of the Roman empire to the great inter- 

 mixture of the many dissimilar races within its borders, and especially on the 

 Italian peninsula. The greater part of the population of Rome during Imperial 

 times consisted of foreigners. Rome presented a similar picture to New York 

 to-day. Polit.-Anthrop. Rev., Leipz., 1906-7, V., 557 et seq. 



