Although I assured him that to me they were all just the editors of my favorite journal and after that plain, American citizens, I too am often impressed by that sense of dominance and power emanating from these men and others in similar positions. The feeling is not unrelated to that I have experienced the few times I have been in the presence of royalty.
In our public men of exalted position there may be lacking the mystical element by which monarchs are surrounded; but the sovereign American has more physical energy and force.
Should the thrones of Europe suddenly become vacant, I know dozens of our men who could occupy them, without their subjects becoming conscious of much change; and as far as queens are concerned we could easily furnish a surplus.
The Herr Director and I had been chosen to sit in the places of honor, and we (or at least I) forgot to eat, and spent my time studying these superb types of Americans.
The Herr Director, being more sophisticated, absorbed both the food and the company, and in his lectures on “Die Leitenden Maenner in Den Vereinigten Staaten,” which he has delivered since returning to Germany, there are evidences that he remembered the minutest details of the menu, as well as every word which fell from the lips of the editor in chief.
Of course we spoke of many, if not all, the perplexing problems which vex this problem-ridden age, and each of us had a proprietary interest in one or more of them which we hoped to solve. The editor as a man of affairs knew our particular problems as well as we knew them, and had read all that any of us had written; so the conversation was animated enough, and certainly illuminating.
My specialty being immigration, and having just returned from the Pacific coast where I had studied the problem as it concerns the Oriental, the conversation was finally dominated by that interesting and somewhat delicate theme.
Can we assimilate all these varied elements which come to us? Can we make of them one people, and eliminate all those ethnic, national and religious inheritances which are frequently at variance with our own?
The editor believed we can assimilate all or most of them with the exception of the Oriental, “Who, having separated from the ethnic root in the Pleistocene period, represents too varied a physical and mental type to be assimilated by the Occidental.” I think I am quoting him correctly, although not word for word.
As I did not quite agree with him, I expressed my views, and so did the Herr Director. I said I thought I noticed among the Chinese and even among the Japanese the influence of this new environment, and could tell of conversations with groups of graduates of our colleges, in which not only the influence of this country was noticeable, but the influence of the particular institution from which they graduated. Anecdotes are not easily accepted as scientific proof; but this being an informal luncheon, I ventured a few of them which every one seemed to relish except the Herr Director, and he is not to blame for that, as anecdotes are rarely international. I do blame him, however, for telling me that he had never heard stupider jokes in his life. One of these ethnic anecdotes I told upon the authority of the Bishop of the Yangtsze district. Perhaps like all anecdotes it may have grown in the telling.