ightmares; and to such I have more than once recommended that they
would do well to take a holiday of six months; journey through the West,
and so come to a realisation of the magnitude of their country and
correct their point of view. With every mile that one recedes from
Castle Garden, the phenomenon grows less appalling: the cloud which was
dense enough to blacken New York harbour makes not a veil to stop one
ray of sunlight when shredded out over the Mississippi Valley and the
Western plains.

A bucket of sewage (or of Eau de Cologne), however formidable in itself,
makes very little difference when tipped into the St. Lawrence River. It
is, of course, a portentous fact that some twenty millions of foreigners
should have come into the country to settle in the course of half a
century; but, after all, the process of assimilation has been
constantly and successfully at work throughout those fifty years, and I
think the figures will show that in no one year (not even in 1906, when
the volume of immigration was the largest and contained the greatest
proportion of the distinctly "undesirable" elements), if we set against
the totals the number of those aliens returning to their own countries
and deduct those who have come from the English-speaking countries, has
the influx amounted to three quarters of one per cent of the entire
population of the country.

So far, the dilution of the original character of the people by the
injection of the foreign elements has been curiously slight, and while
recognising that the inflow of the last few years has been more serious,
both in quantity and character, than at any previous period, there does
not seem to me any reason for questioning the ability of the country to
absorb and assimilate it without any impairment of the fundamental
qualities of the people. That at certain points near the seaboard, or in
places where the newly introduced aliens become congested in masses of
industrial workers, they present a local problem of extreme difficulty
may be granted, but I think that those who are in contact with these
local problems are inclined to exaggerate the general or national
danger. The dominating American type will persist, as it persists
to-day; the people will remain, in all that is essential, an Anglo-Saxon
and a homogeneous people.

In one sense--and that the essential one--the American people is more
homogeneous than the English. What individuals among them may have been
in