ion
into the mass of the white population; when the State was admitted a
couple of years ago, one of the two Senators, and three of the five
Representatives in Congress, were partly of Indian blood. In but a
few years these Indian tribes will have disappeared as completely as
those that have actually died out; but the disappearance will be by
absorption and transformation into the mass of the American
population.

A like wide diversity in fact may be covered in the statement that a
civilization has "died out." The nationality and culture of the
wonderful city-builders of the lower Mesopotamian Plain have
completely disappeared, and, though doubtless certain influences
dating therefrom are still at work, they are in such changed and
hidden form as to be unrecognizable. But the disappearance of the
Roman Empire was of no such character. There was complete change,
far-reaching transformation, and at one period a violent dislocation;
but it would not be correct to speak either of the blood or the
culture of Old Rome as extinct. We are not yet in a position to
dogmatize as to the permanence or evanescence of the various strains
of blood that go to make up every civilized nationality; but it is
reasonably certain that the blood of the old Roman still flows through
the veins of the modern Italian; and though there has been much
intermixture, from many different foreign sources--from foreign
conquerors and from foreign slaves--yet it is probable that the
Italian type of to-day finds its dominant ancestral type in the
ancient Latin. As for the culture, the civilization of Rome, this is
even more true. It has suffered a complete transformation, partly by
natural growth, partly by absorption of totally alien elements, such
as a Semitic religion, and certain Teutonic governmental and social
customs; but the process was not one of extinction, but one of growth
and transformation, both from within and by the accretion of outside
elements. In France and Spain the inheritance of Latin blood is small;
but the Roman culture which was forced on those countries has been
tenaciously retained by them, throughout all their subsequent ethnical
and political changes, as the basis on which their civilizations have
been built. Moreover, the permanent spreading of Roman influence was
not limited to Europe. It has extended to and over half of that New
World which was not even dreamed of during the thousand years of
brilliant life between the birt