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 Mediterranean basin present to-day a greater mixture of dissimilar races than any country on the globe, yet these regions, once the center of civilization, 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.[1] 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 acquainted 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 Romans first made their acquaintance. These tribes lived in Scandinavia, northern Germany and on the islands of the Baltic Sea. Full 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 inhabitants with these northern conquerors; but as the latter were far in the minority, the Teutonic blood has, in the course of many centuries, 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
- ↑ Macchioro ascribes the decline of the Roman empire to the great intermixture 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.
