if not refuge, and upon a basis of virtual race equality mingle, and for good or ill, send down to posterity in a common stream their racial values-and their racial defects. Whether we like it or not, this is the fact. We are not a race, in any ethnic sense. At most, we are in the very early stages of becoming one.

Prof. Ulysses G. Weatherly, of Indiana University, said: 1

Every great historical race is a composite of originally separate elements merged into a unity whose ruling characteristic is an increasing integration of culture rather than of blood. This process of merging is believed by Gumplowicz to constitute the very essence of world history.

And he quotes Gumplowicz, in Der Rassencampf, to this effect:

Throughout the whole history of men stretches a continuous process of amalgamation which, beginning with the smallest primitive synthetic groups and following a racebuilding law to us unknown, binds together and amalgamates small, heterogenous groups into even larger unities, into peoples, races, and nations, perpetually bringing them into conflict against other similarly constituted and amalgamated peoples, nations, and races, and through this conflict into ever new fields of conquest and culture, which again consolidates and amalgamates the heterogenous elements.

The American people has been and is being made by exactly this process. We are in the midst of the making of the "American." It does not yet appear what he shall be, but one thing is certain, he is not to be of any particular racial type now distinguishable. Saxon, Teuton, and Kelt, Latin and Slav-to say nothing of any appreciable contribution by yellow and brown races as yet negligible in this aspect of the

1 Proceedings of the American Sociological Society, vol. v, p. 57, etc., paper on "The Racial Element in Social Assimilation."

question each of the races that we now know on this soil will have its share of "ancestorial" responsibility for the "typical American" that is to be.

NOT RACIAL, BUT CULTURAL

Leaving for the long future, then, the evolution of the hereditary type, is there so soon something "home grown," some "integration of culture," that is peculiarly our own? Every American knows in his heart that however subtle and elusive, however difficult of definition, there is something real that distinguishes "America."

In the attempt to fix the boundaries for the new Poland, the Peace Conference sought in vain for some limits of language or of political unity on which to base their demarcation. It came down at last to a simple question:

"Do you want to be Poles?"

And the question was enough.

Who doubts the answer to the question: Do you want to be American? There is something more than love of home, something higher than the liking of a cat for the warm place under the familiar stove, that stirs the heart of every normal American when he sees the Stars and Stripes. The alien who declares it his intention to become a citizen of the United States may not be able to put it in words, but he means, and he knows that he means, something real and vital, recognizes a substantial distinction, when he says that he wants to be an American!

There must be, there is, there has been always, in the midst of the racial chaos which to-day constitutes perhaps our greatest social problem, something that may be called nationally even if not yet racially American; something indigenous on this soil as on no

other. It belongs to us. Up to a time beginning a quarter of a century ago, when the so-called "new immigration" from southeastern Europe and southern Russia set in in full flood, and now anew in the experiences of the World War, it was and has again become, a thing shared by all of our racial groups and elements peculiarly American. It answers the test set forth by Professor Weatherly in the paper already quoted, of the completion of the nationalizing procwhen the things of the spirit are held in common and cherished by all, even if some specific ethnic or linguistic differences survive." Or, in the words which he attributes to Renan:

ess:

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To have a common glory in the past, a common will in the present; to have done great things together, to desire to do still greater-these are the essential conditions for being a People.

Professor Weatherly repeatedly emphasizes the great point-that "it is not sufficient that peoples should merely have undergone similar experiences" in order to be knit into a nation; "they must have undergone them together." Most of the great modern nations, as he says, have passed through the same processes of social change, "but in actual adjustment to such change each has had its own separate career.

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Twenty-five years ago it was true that the term 'American" meant one who, of whatever racial descent, represented something very definite, of tradition, experience, and achievement-and of promise, tooa common glory in the past, a common will in the present"; "great things done together, and a desire to do still greater"; unity determined not by external facts alone, but by sentiment.

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Now, dimly as we yet realize it, it is true again. A baptism of blood and suffering, of sacrifice and self

denial, and of common experience in a vast world emergency, and out of it a vision of better understanding and a great work before us to be done, have gone far to restore that unity of appreciation of "great things done together" and of will to do still greater which was our common glory-and was getting lost. We had, we have now, a right to be both proud and jealous of the heritage left us by our fathers of many races, and now watered by the blood of our own generation, and to look with concern, if not with dismay, upon what might portend a swallowing up of this moral, this sentimental unity, in a great inundation of newcomers, who, however well intending as individuals, have not shared our tradition and experience, and who seem not to have been fitted by any experience of their own to assimilate either the tradition of our past or our aspiration for the future.

There are essentials distinctively American upon which we can base our definition of "America" and typify her in the human being who by spirit, vision, and vigilance best represents our tradition and our aspiration. Such a definition will hold against the world-even against those of our own household who neither exemplify nor understand it. The sum total of these essentials is not paralleled now, nor in history, anywhere else on earth. For of America alone it may be said:

That however lamely and insufficiently we have lived up to it, our country is traditionally the refuge for the oppressed of every land.

That here the individual has found a fuller freedom to seek his happiness in his own way. More than any other nation, America has never recognized a political

autocracy, has reckoned Man above every consideration of property, class, or dynasty.

That here only has the individual male from the beginning been deemed the ultimate political unit—“one man, one vote." The country-wide adoption of Woman Suffrage extends this concept to include women.

That however crudely we have practiced it, we have aspired to estimate essential justice and the common sense of right relationship fair play between man and manas the final standard and appeal of human conduct, over against every claim of precedent and authority.

That from the outset of this nation, the distinguishing spirit of America has been a protest against Militarism and the domination of the professional soldier, against compulsory military service in time of peace. Our army and navy, always thought of as instrumentalities of last resort, reserved almost wholly for defense against aggression from without, have on principle been always under the control and direction of civilians as such, and in peace time have been recruited by voluntary enlistment. This one fact of freedom from military conscription has been the distinction of America which, more than any other thing, has attracted Europeans to our fellowship. They have fought for us and with us, but always with the American motive, embodied in the final great fact, which is America's alone:

That when we have gone to war, our civilians armed and fighting with the devotion, courage, and effectiveness inspired only by the sense of a righteous cause, it has always been for liberty. At the beginning, in 1776, and again in 1812, we fought England to free ourselves. In 1845, despite the motive of the Slave Power to extend the area of slavery, so far as the motive of the people in general was concerned we were fighting Mexico to free our fellows in Texas. In 1861 we fought a great civil war to maintain our free Union and to