of the basal facts in the intellectual life of the United States
of to-day.

Yet that life, as I have already hinted, is not so simple in its terms
as it might be if we had to reckon merely with the men of a single
stock, albeit with imaginations quickened by contact with an Oriental
religion, and minds disciplined, directly or indirectly, by the methods
and the literatures which the Revival of Learning imposed upon modern
Europe. American formal culture is, and has been, from the beginning,
predominantly English. Yet it has been colored by the influences of
other strains of race, and by alien intellectual traditions. Such
international influences as have reached us through German and
Scandinavian, Celtic and Italian, Russian and Jewish immigration, are
well marked in certain localities, although their traces may be
difficult to follow in the main trend of American writing. The presence
of Negro, Irishman, Jew, and German, has affected our popular humor and
satire, and is everywhere to be marked in the vocabulary and tone of
our newspapers. The cosmopolitan character of the population of such
cities as New York and Chicago strikes every foreign observer. Each one
of the manifold races now transplanted here and in process of
Americanization has for a while its own newspapers and churches and
social life carried on in a foreign dialect. But this stage of
evolution passes swiftly. The assimilative forces of American schools,
industry, commerce, politics, are too strong for the foreign immigrant
to resist. The Italian or Greek fruit pedler soon prefers to talk
English, and his children can be made to talk nothing else. This
extraordinary amalgamating power of English culture explains, no
doubt, why German and Scandinavian immigration--to take examples from
two of the most intelligent and educated races that have contributed to
the up-building of the country--have left so little trace, as yet, upon
our more permanent literature.

But blood will have its say sooner or later. No one knows how
profoundly the strong mentality of the Jew, already evident enough in
the fields of manufacturing and finance, will mould the intellectual
life of the United States. The mere presence, to say nothing of the
rapid absorption, of these millions upon millions of aliens, as the
children of the Puritans regard them, is a constant evidence of the
subtle ways in which internationalism is playing its part in the
fashioning of the American temp