THE COMPOSITE OF RACES AND RELIGIONS IN AMERICA. 241 



greatest opportunity ever presented of developing the finest 

 race the world has ever known out of the vast mingling of races 

 brought here by immigration," just as we may accept the 

 opposite, namely, " the biologic law that when a race lives an 

 isolated life without an infusion of new blood it degenerates." 



2. The Folitical Composite. 



In America this will be a somewhat complete democracy. 

 This refers not to form of government, but to the conditions 

 out of which government springs. It does not matter whether 

 the cjovernment is a limited monarchy as in Enfjland, or 

 representative as now in America, or a democracy as many in 

 America wish it to be and are trying to make it, or something 

 else as yet untried. The essential fact is that the people can make 

 it what they please. They ordain constitutions, laws, courts, 

 customs. They choose executives, judges, lawmakers. Historically 

 the political development of the United States is most interesting. 

 The future cannot differ greatly from the past except to evolve 

 into completeness. The seventeen hundred men who formed the 

 constitutions of the original thirteen states, the models of all 

 later constitutions, were all native-born Americans except 

 fifteen, and these fifteen were as essentially American as the 

 others. Of the fifty-five men who formed the constitution of 

 the Federal government in 1787, only four were foreign-born ; 

 and who can say that these four — Robert Morris from England, 

 Alexander Hamilton from the West Indies, John Eutledge and 

 Pierce Butler from Ireland were less American than the other 

 fifty-one. The proportion scarcely varied in the conventions 

 wliich adopted later constitutions. The Maine constitutional 

 convention of 1820 with 293 delegates contained only two 

 foreign-born, one from Ireland and one from Wales. The 

 125 delegates to the constitutional convention in Xew York 

 in 1821 were all native-born; and in 18-16 all but two. The 

 seventeen states formed since 1850 adopted constitutions framed 

 by conventions composed almost entirely of native-born 

 citizens. Constitution-making in America has therefore been 

 confined to the Teuton and the Celt. 



The significance of this tremendous fact in a nation whose 

 diversity of race, interests, occupations, climate, ideals, concepts 

 of life is so great lies in this, — namely, that the America of 

 to-day is the product of the Eeformation in Europe in the 

 sixteenth and seventeentli centuries. The moral, religious, 



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