ame proportion as these were originally combined.

Some latter-day writers deplore the enormous immigration to our shores
as making us a heterogeneous instead of a homogeneous people; but as a
matter of fact we are less heterogeneous at the present day than we
were at the outbreak of the Revolution. Our blood was as much mixed a
century ago as it is now. No State now has a smaller proportion of
English blood than New York or Pennsylvania had in 1775. Even in New
England, where the English stock was purest, there was a certain
French and Irish mixture; in Virginia there were Germans in addition.
In the other colonies, taken as a whole, it is not probable that much
over half of the blood was English; Dutch, French, German, and Gaelic
communities abounded.

But all were being rapidly fused into one people. As the Celt of
Cornwall and the Saxon of Wessex are now alike Englishmen, so in 1775
Hollander and Huguenot, whether in New York or South Carolina, had
become Americans, undistinguishable from the New Englanders and
Virginians, the descendants of the men who followed Cromwell or
charged behind Rupert. When the great western movement began we were
already a people by ourselves. Moreover, the immense immigration from
Europe that has taken place since, had little or no effect on the way
in which we extended our boundaries; it only began to be important
about the time that we acquired our present limits. These limits would
in all probability be what they now are even if we had not received a
single European colonist since the Revolution.

Thus the Americans began their work of western conquest as a separate
and individual people, at the moment when they sprang into national
life. It has been their great work ever since. All other questions
save those of the preservation of the Union itself and of the
emancipation of the blacks have been of subordinate importance when
compared with the great question of how rapidly and how completely
they were to subjugate that part of their continent lying between the
eastern mountains and the Pacific. Yet the statesmen of the Atlantic
seaboard were often unable to perceive this, and indeed frequently
showed the same narrow jealousy of the communities beyond the
Alleghanies that England felt for all America. Even if they were too
broad-minded and far-seeing to feel thus, they yet were unable to
fully appreciate the magnitude of the interests at stake in the west.
They thought more of our