The American community is not an expanded colonial society
that has become autonomous. It is a great and deepening pool of
population accumulating upon the area these predecessors freed, and
since fed copiously by affluents from every European community. Fresh
ingredients are still being added in enormous quantity, in quantity so
great as to materially change the racial quality in a score of years. It
is particularly noteworthy that each accession of new blood seems to
sterilise its predecessors. Had there been no immigration at all into
the United States, but had the rate of increase that prevailed in
1810-20 prevailed to 1900, the population, which would then have been a
purely native American one, would have amounted to a hundred
million--that is to say, to approximately nine million in excess of the
present total population. The new waves are for a time amazingly fecund,
and then comes a rapid fall in the birth-rate. The proportion of
colonial and early republican blood in the population is, therefore,
probably far smaller even than the figures I have quoted would suggest.
These accesses of new population have come in a series of waves, very
much as if successive reservoirs of surplus population in the Old World
had been tapped, drained and exhausted.
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