the term. Ethnically, the
only real Americans are the Indian descendants of the aboriginal
races. But it is futile to combat universal usage: the World War has
clinched the name upon the inhabitants of the United States. The
American army, the American navy, American physicians and nurses,
American food and clothing--these are phrases with a definite
geographical and ethnic meaning which neither academic ingenuity nor
race rivalry can erase from the memory of mankind.

This chapter, however, is to discuss the American stock, and it is
necessary to look farther back than mere citizenship; for there are
millions of American citizens of foreign birth or parentage who,
though they are Americans, are clearly not of any American stock.

At the time of the Revolution there was a definite American
population, knit together by over two centuries of toil in the hard
school of frontier life, inspired by common political purposes,
speaking one language, worshiping one God in divers manners,
acknowledging one sovereignty, and complying with the mandates of one
common law. Through their common experience in subduing the wilderness
and in wresting their independence from an obstinate and stupid
monarch, the English colonies became a nation. Though they did not
fulfill Raleigh's hope and become an English nation, they were much
more English than non-English, and these Revolutionary Americans may
be called today, without abuse of the term, the original American
stock. Though they were a blend of various races, a cosmopolitan
admixture of ethnic strains, they were not more varied than the
original admixture of blood now called English.

We may, then, properly begin our survey of the racial elements in the
United States by a brief scrutiny of this American stock, the parent
stem of the American people, the great trunk, whose roots have
penetrated deep into the human experience of the past and whose
branches have pushed upward and outward until they spread over a whole
continent.

The first census of the United States was taken in 1790. More than a
hundred years later, in 1909, the Census Bureau published _A Century
of Population Growth_ in which an attempt was made to ascertain the
nationality of those who comprised the population at the taking of the
first census. In that census no questions of nativity were asked. This
omission is in itself significant of the homogeneity of the population
at that time. The only available data, ther