Population, the most convenient gauge of national strength and progress, is far from being a universally reliable one. We shall find sometimes as wide a difference between two given millions as between two given individuals. Either may grow without doing much else. They may direct their energies to different fields. Compared with the United States, France and Germany, for example, have advanced but little in population. They have, however, done wonders for themselves and the world by activities which we have, in comparison, neglected. The old city of London gains in wealth as it loses in inhabitants.
Yet success in the multiplication of souls within their own borders—depopulate as they may elsewhere—is eagerly coveted and regularly measured by all the nations. Since 1790, when we set them the example, they have one by one adopted the rule of numbering heads every five, six or ten years, recognizing latterly as well, more and more, the importance of numbering other things, until men, women and children have come to be embedded in a medley of steam-engines, pigs, newspapers, schools, churches and bolts of calico. For twenty centuries this taking of stock by governments had been an obsolete practice, until revived by the framers of the American Constitution and made a vital part of that instrument. The right of the most—and not of the richest, the best, the bravest, the cleverest, or the oldest in blood—to rule being formally recognized and set down on paper, it became necessary to ascertain at stated intervals who were the most. The lords of the soil, instead of being inducted into power on the death of their parents with great pother of ointment, Te Deum, heraldry, drum and trumpet, were chosen every ten years by a corps of humble knights of the pencil and schedule.
To these disposers of empire, the enhancement and complication of whose toil has been a labor of love with each decennial Congress, we owe the knowledge that eighty years, out of the hundred, brought the people of the Union up from a tally of 3,929,214 in 1790 to 38,558,371 in 1870, and that down to the beginning of the last decade the rate of increment adhered closely to 35 per cent. On that basis of growth the latest return falls nearly four millions short. One of the causes of this is "too obvious" (and too disagreeable) "to mention;" but it is inadequate. The sharp demarcation of the western frontier by the grasshopper and the hygrometer is another, which will continue to operate until, by irrigation, tree-planting or some other device, a new climate can be manufactured for the Plains. The teeming West, that of old needed only to be tickled with a hoe to laugh with a harvest, has disappeared. At least what is left of it has lost the power of suction that was wont to reach across the ocean, pull Ballys and Dorfs up by the roots and transplant them bodily to the Muskingum and the Des Moines. A third cause, operating more especially within the current decade, is attributable to another mode in which that attractive power has been exerted—the absorption from the European purse for the construction of railways of seven or eight times as much as the thirty-five millions in specie it took to fight through the Revolutionary war. For a while, Hans came with his thalers, but they outfooted him—"fast and faster" behind came "unmerciful disaster," and he was fain to turn his back on the land of promise and promises. Similar set-backs, however, are interspersed through our previous history, and the influence of the last one may be over-rated.
In truth, the Old World's fund of humanity is not sufficiently ample to keep up the pace; and the rate of natural increase is no longer what it was when the country was all new, and cornfield and nursery vied in fecundity. That the former source of augmentation is gaining in proportion upon the latter is apparent from the last three returns. The ratio of foreign-born inhabitants to the aggregate in 1850 was 9.68 per cent. in 1860, 13.16, and in 1870, 14.44. In the last-named year, moreover, 10,892,015, or 28 per cent. of the entire population, white and black, are credited with foreign parentage on one or both sides. Excluding the colored element, ranked as all native, this proportion rises to 32 per cent.
Judged by the test of language, three-fifths of those who are of foreign birth disappear from the roll of foreigners, 3,119,705 out of 5,567,229 having come from the British Isles and British America. Germany, including Bohemia, Holland and Switzerland, sums up 1,883,285; Scandinavia, 241,685; and France and Belgium, 128,955. The Celtic influx from Ireland, and the Teutonic and Norse together, form two currents of almost identical volume. Compared with either, the contribution of the Latin or the Romance races sinks into insignificance—an insignificance, however, that shows itself chiefly in numbers, the traces of their character and influence being, relatively to their numerical strength, marked. The immigrants from Northern and Southern Europe have a disposition, in choosing their new homes, to follow latitude, or rather the isotherms; the North-men skirting the Canadian frontier and grouping themselves on the coldest side of Lake Michigan, while the Italians, Spaniards and French drift toward the Gulf States. The Irish and Germans are more cosmopolitan, each in a like degree. They disperse with less regard to climate or surroundings, and are more rapidly and imperceptibly absorbed and blended, thus promoting rather than marring the homogeneity of the American people. The Germans are, however, more prone to colonizing than the Irish—a circumstance due in great measure to their differing in language from the mass of their new neighbors. This cause of isolation is gradually losing its weight, the recognition of the German tongue by State legislatures, municipalities, etc. being less common than formerly, notwithstanding the immense immigratior so calculated to extend it.
While assimilation has been growing more complete, and a fixed resultant becoming more discernible, the ingredients of this ethnic medley do not seem to have materially varied in their proportions since the beginning of the century. They present a tolerably close parallel to the like process in Northern France, where Celt and Teuton combined in nearly equal numbers, with, as in our case, a limited local infusion of the Norse. The result cannot, however, be identical, the French lacking our Anglo-Saxon substratum, with its valuable traditions and habitudes of political thought. The balance between impulse and conservatism has never been, in this country, long or seriously disturbed, and is probably as sound now as a hundred years ago. In the discussions of the twenty years which embrace our Revolutionary period we find abundance of theory, but they were never carried by abstractions out of sight of the practical. Our publicists were not misled by convictions of the "infinite perfectibility of the human mind," the motive proclaimed by Condorcet, writing in sweet obliviousness of the guillotine, as explaining "how much more pure, accurate and profound are the principles upon which the constitution and laws of France have been formed than those which directed the Americans." The lack of this equilibrium among the pure, and, as we may venture to term them, the untrained races, we have occasional opportunities of noting on our own soil when for a passing cause they resort to isolated action.
