and young women between seventeen and thirty, good, youthful, hopeful peasant stock.  They stand in a long string, waiting to go through that wicket, with bundles, with little tin boxes, with cheap portmanteaus with odd packages, in pairs, in families, alone, women with children, men with strings of dependents, young couples.  All day that string of human beads waits there, jerks forward, waits again; all day and every day, constantly replenished, constantly dropping the end beads through the wicket, till the units mount to hundreds and the hundreds to thousands....  In such a prosperous year as 1906 more immigrants passed through that wicket into America than children were born in the whole of France.

This figure of a perpetual stream of new stranger citizens will serve to mark the primary distinction between the American social problem and that of any European or Asiatic community.

The vast bulk of the population of the United States has, in fact, only got there from Europe in the course of the last hundred years, and mainly since the accession of Queen Victoria to the throne of Great Britain.  That is the first fact that the student of the American social future must realise.  Only an extremely small proportion of its blood goes back now to those who fought for freedom in the days of George Washington.  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.  First came the Irish and Germans, then Central Europeans of various types, then Poland and Western Russia began to pour out their teeming peoples, and more particularly their Jews, Bohemia, the Slavonic states, Italy and Hungary followed and the latest arrivals include great numbers of Levantines, Armenians and other peoples from Asia Minor and the Balkan Peninsula.  The Hungarian immigrants have still a birth-rate of forty-six per thousand, the highest birth-rate in the world.