idea is present in the root of their own civilization: it derives from
Rome. But it can hardly be expected of peoples of a wholly alien
tradition from which the Roman Law and the Gospel of Rousseau are alike
remote. This consideration lies at the root of the exception of the
Negro, the exception of the Mongol, and may one day produce the
exception of the Jew.

The other reservation is this: that if the immigration of diverse
peoples proceeds at too rapid a rate, it may be impossible for
absorption to keep pace with it. Nay, absorption may be grievously
hindered by it. This has been shown with great force and clearness by
Mr. Zangwill under his excellent image of the "Melting Pot." Anyone even
casually visiting New York, for instance, can see on every side the
great masses of unmelted foreign material and their continual
reinforcement from overseas, probably delaying continually the process
of fusion--and New York is only typical in this of other great American
cities.

A new tendency to limit immigration and to seek some test of its quality
has been a marked feature of the last quarter of a century. The
principle is almost certainly sound; the right to act on it, to anyone
who accepts the doctrine of national self-government, unquestionable.
Whether the test ultimately imposed by a recent Act passed by Congress
over President Wilson's veto, that of literacy, is a wise one, is
another question. Its tendency may well be to exclude great masses of
the peasantry of the Old World, men admirably fitted to develop by their
industry the resources of America, whose children at least could easily
be taught to read and write the American language and would probably
become excellent American citizens. On the other hand, it does not
exclude the criminal, or at any rate the most dangerous type of
criminal. It does not exclude the submerged population of great European
cities, the exploitation of whose cheap labour is a menace to the
American workman's standard of life. And it does not, generally
speaking, exclude the Jew.

The problem of the Jew exists in America as elsewhere--perhaps more
formidably than elsewhere. This, of course, is not because Jews, as
such, are worse than other people: only idiots are Anti-Semites in that
sense. It arises from the fact that America, more than any other nation,
lives by its power of absorption, and the Jew has, ever since the Roman
Empire, been found a singularly unabsorbable person. He has