There are waiting throngs cooped up in cities and at temporary standing-places.
The welter of negroes and Spaniards and half-castes in the South, in the black pale; the Swedes and Norwegians and Finns in the Middle West; the million Jews in New York; the millions of them elsewhere, saying, as Mary Antin, that America and not Judea is the Promised Land, the place where the tribes will be gathered together again and form a nation; the great Anglo-Saxon stock of America, who would feel themselves to be the leaven, the ruling principle in the choir dance; the Dutch-Americans of Pennsylvania; the Irish, of whom there tend to be more in America than in Ireland; the Slovaks and Ruthenians on the Pennsylvanian collieries; the Italian gangs on the road and the Italian quarters of a thousand towns; the Poles, of whom in New York alone there are more than in any city in Poland; the enormous number of Germans living on the land; the hundred thousand Russian working men in Pennsylvania alone; the Molokan Russians in California, and the Russian gold-washers; the Red Indians on the Reservations; the composite gangs of all nations in the world going up and down the country doing jobs.
The Jews bring music, mathematical instinct, a sense of justice, industry, commercial organisation, and commercial tyranny, national wealth, material prosperity, restlessness.
The English bring ignorance, pluck, and honour; the Scottish bring their brains and their morals; the Irish bring generosity, cleverness, laziness, hatred of Jews and of meanness.
The Germans bring the idea of growth and development, evolution, and with it their own music. They also bring an instinct for efficiency and shining armour.
The negro brings sensual music and dancing, a taste for barbaric splendour, the gentleness of little children, and the wildness of the beasts of the forest at night; and he brings imitativeness, subserviency, a taste for slavery.
The Red Indians bring the remembrance of the Virgin Continent—litheness of limb, subtler ear and nose and eyes for the things of the earth.
The Italians bring their emotionalism and excitability, their songs, their passion, their fighting spirit.