these successive frontiers, for the most part. The recent radical Populist agitation is a case in point. Many a state that now declines any connection with the tenets of the Populists itself adhered to such ideas in an earlier stage of the development of the state. A primitive society can hardly be expected to show the appreciation of the complexity of business interests in a developed society. The continual recurrence of these areas of paper-money agitation is another evidence that the frontier can be isolated and studied as a factor in American history of the highest importance.

Intellectual Traits

From the conditions of frontier life came intellectual traits of profound importance. The works of travelers along each frontier from colonial days onward describe certain common traits, and these traits have, while softening down, still persisted as survivals in the place of their origin, even when a higher social organization succeeded. The result is that to the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic, but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy;1 that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and, withal, that buoyancy and exuberance which come with freedom-these are traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier. We are not easily aware of the deep influence of this individualistic way of thinking upon our present conditions. It persists in the midst of a society that has passed away from the conditions that occasioned it. It makes it difficult to secure social regulation of business enterprises that are essentially

1Colonial travelers agree in remarking on the phlegmatic characteristics of the colonists. It has frequently been asked how such a people could have developed that strained nervous energy now characteristic of them. Cf. Sumner, Alexander Hamilton, p. 98, and Adams, History of the United States, vol. i, p. 6o; vol. ix, pp. 240, 241. The transition appears to become marked at the close of the War of 1812, a period when interest centered upon the development of the West, and the West was noted for restless energy.-Grund, Americans, vol. ii, p. 1. [Turner's note.]

public; it is a stumbling-block in the way of civil-service reform; it permeates our doctrines of education;1 but with the passing of the free lands a vast extension of the social tendency may be expected in America.

Ratzel, the well-known geographer, has pointed out the fact that for centuries the great unoccupied area of America furnished to the American spirit something of its own largeness. It has given a largeness of design and an optimism to American thought. Since the days when the fleet of Columbus sailed into the waters of the New World, America has been another name for opportunity, and the people of the United States have taken their tone from the incessant expansion which has not only been open, but has even been forced upon them. He would be a rash prophet who should assert that the expansive character of American life has now entirely ceased. Movement has been its dominant fact, and, unless this training has no effect upon a people, the American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise.3 But never again will such gifts of free land offer themselves. For a moment, at the frontier, the bonds of custom are broken and unrestraint is triumphant. There is not tabula rasa. The stubborn American environment is there with its imperious summons to accept its conditions; the inherited ways of doing things are also there; and yet, in spite of environment, and in spite of custom, each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past; and freshness, and confidence, and scorn of older society, impatience of its restraints and its ideas, and indifference to its lessons have accompanied the frontier. What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that, and more, the ever-retreating frontier has been to the United States directly, and to the nations of Europe more remotely. And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end

1See the able paper by Professor de Garno on "Social Aspects of Moral Education," in the Third Yearbook of the National Herbart Society, 1897, p. 37. [Turner's note.] 2See paper on "The West as a Field for Historical Study,” in Report of American Historical Association for 1896, pp. 279-319. [Turner's note.]

The commentary upon this sentence-written in 1893-lies in the recent history of Hawaii, Cuba, Porto Rico, the Philippines, and the Isthmian Canal. [Turner's note.]

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of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.

THE INFLUENCE OF THE IMMIGRANT ON AMERICA1

WALTER EDWARD WEYL

[Walter Edward Weyl (1873- -) was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 1892, he made a special study of political economy at Halle, Berlin, and Paris. He has written much on economic subjects and is a statistical expert on commerce and labor.]

We must not forget that these men and women who file through the narrow gates at Ellis Island, hopeful, confused, with bundles of misconceptions as heavy as the great sacks upon their backs-we must not forget that these simple, roughhanded people are the ancestors of our descendants, the fathers and mothers of our children.

So it has been from the beginning. For a century a swelling human stream has poured across the ocean, fleeing from poverty in Europe to a chance in America. Englishman, Welshman, Scotchman, Irishman; German, Swede, Norwegian, Dane; Jew, Italian, Bohemian, Serb; Syrian, Hungarian, Pole, Greek— one race after another has knocked at our doors, been given admittance, has married us and begot our children. We could not have told by looking at them whether they were to be good or bad progenitors, for racially the cabin is not above the steerage, and dirt, like poverty and ignorance, is but skin-deep. A few hours, and the stain of travel has left the immigrant's cheek; a few years, and he loses the odor of alien soils; a generation or two, and these outlanders are irrevocably our race, our nation, our stock.

That stock, a little over a century ago, was almost pure British. True, Albany was Dutch, and many of the signs in the Philadelphia streets were in the German language. Neverthe

1From "New Americans," Harper's Monthly Magazine, vol. cxxix, p. 615 (1914).

less, five-sixths of all the family names collected in 1790 by the census authorities were pure English, and over nine-tenths (90.2 per cent.) were British. Despite the presence of Germans, Dutch, French, and Negroes, the American was essentially an Englishman once removed, an Englishman stuffed with English traditions, prejudices, and stubbornnesses, reading English books, speaking English dialects, practising English law and English evasions of the law, and hating England with a truly English hatred. In all but a political sense America was still one of "His Majesty's dominions beyond the sea." Even after immigration poured in upon us, the English stock was strong enough to impress upon the immigrating races its language, laws, and customs. Nevertheless, the incoming millions profoundly altered our racial structure. Today over thirty-two million Americans are either foreign-born or of foreign parentage. No longer an Anglo-Saxon cousin, America has become the most composite of nations.

We cannot help seeing that such a vast transfusion of blood must powerfully affect the character of the American. What that influence is to be, however, whether for better or for worse, is a question more baffling. Our optimists conceive the future American, the child of this infinite intermarrying, as a glorified, synthetical person, replete with the best qualities of all component races. He is to combine the sturdiness of the Bulgarian peasant, the poetry of the Pole, the vivid artistic perceptions of the Italian, the Jew's intensity, the German's thoroughness, the Irishman's verve, the tenacity of the Englishman, with the initiative and versatility of the American. The pessimist, on the other hand, fears the worst. America, he believes, is committing the unpardonable sin, is contracting a mésalliance, grotesque and gigantic. We are diluting our blood with the blood of lesser breeds. We are suffering adulteration. The stamp upon the coin-the flag, the language, the national sense-remains, but the silver is replaced by lead.

All of which is singularly unconvincing. In our own families, the children do not always inherit the best qualities of father and mother, and we have no assurance that the children of

mixed races have this selective gift and rise superior to their parent stocks. Nor do we know that they fall below. We hear much concerning "pure" races and "mongrel" races. But is there in all the world a pure race? The Jew, once supposed to be of Levitical pureness, is now known to be racially unorthodox. The Englishman is not pure Anglo-Saxon; the German is not Teutonic; the Russian is not Slav. To be mongrel may be a virtue or a vice-we do not know. The problem is too subtle, too elusive, and we have no approved receipts in this vast eugenic kitchen. Intermarrying will go on, whether we like it or loathe it, for love laughs at racial barriers, and the maidens of one nation look fair to the youth of another. Let the kettle boil and let us hope for the best.

But the newcomer brings with him more than his potential parenthood, and he influences America and the American in other ways than by marriage and procreation. He creates new problems of adjustment. He enters into a new environment. He creates a new environment for us. Unconsciously but irresistibly he transforms an America which he does not know. He forces the native American to change, to change that he may feel at home in his own home.

When we seek to discover what is the exact influence of the immigrant upon his new environment, we are met with difficulties almost as insurmountable as those which enter into the problem of the immigrant's influence upon our common heredity. Social phenomena are difficult to isolate. The immigrant is not merely an immigrant; he is also a wage-earner, a city-dweller, perhaps an illiterate. Wage-earning, city-dwelling, and illiteracy are all contributing influences. Your immigrant is a citizen of the new factory, of the great industrial state, within, yet almost overshadowing, the political state. Into each of our problemswages and labor, illiteracy, crime, vice, insanity, pauperism, democracy-the immigrant enters.

There is in all the world no more difficult, no more utterly bewildering problem than this of the intermingling of races. Already thirty million immigrants have arrived, of whom considerably over twenty millions have remained. To interpret

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