its passing than by the
resplendence of the new, and who seemed to forget that it is for the
dramatist to register both impartially--their conflict constituting
another of those spiritual duels which are peculiarly his affair. Jews
are, unlike negroes, a "recessive" type, whose physical traits tend to
disappear in the blended offspring. There does not exist in England
to-day a single representative of the Jewish families whom Cromwell
admitted, though their lineage may be traced in not a few noble
families. Thus every country has been and is a "Melting Pot." But
America, exhibiting the normal fusing process magnified many thousand
diameters and diversified beyond all historic experience, and fed not by
successive waves of immigration but by a hodge-podge of simultaneous
hordes, is, in Bacon's phrase, an "ostensive instance" of a universal
phenomenon. America is _the_ "Melting Pot."

Her people has already begun to take on such a complexion of its own, it
is already so emphatically tending to a new race, crossed with every
European type, that the British illusion of a cousinly Anglo-Saxon
people with whom war is unthinkable is sheer wilful blindness. Even
to-day, while the mixture is still largely mechanical not chemical, the
Anglo-Saxon element is only preponderant; it is very far from being the
sum total.

VI

While our sluggish and sensual English stage has resisted and even
burked the writer's attempt to express in terms of the theatre our
European problems of war and religion, and to interpret through art the
"years of the modern, years of the unperformed," it remains to be
acknowledged with gratitude that this play, designed to bring home to
America both its comparative rawness and emptiness and its true
significance and potentiality for history and civilisation, has been
universally acclaimed by Americans as a revelation of Americanism,
despite that it contains only one native-born American character, and
that a bad one. Played throughout the length and breadth of the States
since its original production in 1908, given, moreover, in Universities
and Women's Colleges, passing through edition after edition in book
form, cited by preachers and journalists, politicians and Presidential
candidates, even calling into existence a "Melting Pot" Club in Boston,
it has had the happy fortune to contribute its title to current thought,
and, in the testimony of Jane Addams, to "perform a great service to
America by remin