Thus the entire process of colonial settlement was one continuous, drastic cycle of eugenic selection. Only the racially fit ordinarily came, while the few unfit who did come were mostly weeded out by the exacting requirements of early American life.
The eugenic results were magnificent. As Madison Grant well says: “Nature had vouchsafed to the Americans of a century ago the greatest opportunity in recorded history to produce in the isolation of a continent a powerful and racially homogeneous people, and had provided for the experiment a pure race of one of the most gifted and vigorous stocks on earth, a stock free from the diseases, physical and moral, which have again and again sapped the vigor of the older lands. Our grandfathers threw away this opportunity in the blissful ignorance of national childhood and inexperience.”[154] The number of great names which America produced at the beginning of its national life shows the high level of ability possessed by this relatively small people (only about 3,000,000 whites in 1790). With our hundred-odd millions we have no such output of genius to-day.
The opening decades of the nineteenth century seemed to portend for America the most glorious of futures. For nearly seventy years after the Revolution, immigration was small, and during that long period of ethnic isolation the colonial stock, unperturbed by alien influences, adjusted its cultural differences and began to display the traits of a genuine new type, harmonious in basic homogeneity and incalculably rich in racial promise. The general level of ability continued high and the output of talent remained extraordinarily large. Perhaps the best feature of the nascent “native American” race was its strong idealism. Despite the materialistic blight which was then creeping over the white world, the native American displayed characteristics more reminiscent of his Elizabethan forebears than of the materialistic Hanoverian Englishman. It was a wonderful time—and it was only the dawn!
But the full day of that wondrous dawning never came. In the late forties of the nineteenth century the first waves of the modern immigrant tide began breaking on our shores, and the tide swelled to a veritable deluge which never slackened till temporarily restrained by the late war. This immigration, to be sure, first came mainly from northern Europe, was thus largely composed of kindred stocks, and contributed many valuable elements. Only during the last thirty years have we been deluged by the truly alien hordes of the European east and south. But, even at its best, the immigrant tide could not measure up to the colonial stock which it displaced, not reinforced, while latterly it became a menace to the very existence of our race, ideals, and institutions. All our slowly acquired balance—physical, mental, and spiritual—has been upset, and we to-day flounder in a veritable Serbonian bog, painfully trying to regain the solid ground on which our grandsires confidently stood.
The dangerous fallacy in that short-sighted idealism which seeks to make America the haven of refuge for the poor and oppressed of all lands, and its evil effects not only on America but on the rest of the world as well, has been convincingly exposed by Professor Ross. He has scant patience with those social “uplifters” whose sympathy with the visible alien at the gate is so keen that they have no feeling for the invisible children of our poor who will find the chances gone, nor for those at the gate of the to-be, who might have been born, but will not be.
“I am not of those,” he writes, “who consider humanity and forget the nation, who pity the living but not the unborn. To me, those who are to come after us stretch forth beseeching hands as well as do the masses on the other side of the globe. Nor do I regard America as something to be spent quickly and cheerfully for the benefit of pent-up millions in the backward lands. What if we become crowded without their ceasing to be so? I regard it (America) as a nation whose future may be of unspeakable value to the rest of mankind, provided that the easier conditions of life here be made permanent by high standards of living, institutions, and ideals, which finally may be appropriated by all men. We could have helped the Chinese a little by letting their surplus millions swarm in upon us a generation ago; but we have helped them infinitely more by protecting our standards and having something worth their copying when the time came.”[155]
The perturbing influence of recent immigration must vex American life for many decades. Even if laws are passed to-morrow so drastic as to shut out permanently the influx of undesirable elements, it will yet take several generations before the combined action of assimilation and elimination shall have restabilized our population and evolved a new type-norm approaching in fixity that which was on the point of crystallizing three-quarters of a century ago.
The biologist Humphrey thus punctures the “melting-pot” delusion: “Our ‘melting-pot,’” he writes, “would not give us in a thousand years what enthusiasts expect of it—a fusing of all our various racial elements into a new type which shall be the true American. It will give us for many generations a perplexing diversity in ancestry, and since our successors must reach back into their ancestry for characteristics, this diversity will increase the uncertainty of their inheritances. They will inherit no stable blended character, because there is no such thing. They will inherit from a mixture of unlike characteristics contributed by unlike peoples, and in their inheritance they will have certain of these characteristics in full identity, while certain others they will not have at all.”[156]
Thus, under even the most favorable circumstances, we are in for generations of racial readjustment—an immense travail, essentially needless, since the final product will probably not measure up to the colonial standard. We will probably never (unless we adopt positive eugenic measures) be the race we might have been if America had been reserved for the descendants of the picked Nordics of colonial times.
But that is no reason for folding our hands in despairing inaction. On the contrary, we should be up and doing, for though some of our race-heritage has been lost, more yet remains. We can still be a very great people—if we will it so. Heaven be praised, the colonial stock was immensely prolific before the alien tide wrought its sterilizing havoc. Even to-day nearly one-half of our population is of the old blood, while many millions of the immigrant stock are sound in quality and assimilable in kind. Only—the immigrant tide must at all costs be stopped and America given a chance to stabilize her ethnic being. It is the old story of the sibylline books. Some, to be sure, are ashes of the dead past; all the more should we conserve the precious volumes which remain.