stock, which, when it went to Britain, received into itself an
enormous infusion of Celtic, a much smaller infusion of Norse and
Danish, and also a certain infusion of Norman-French blood. When this
new English stock came to America it mingled with and absorbed into
itself immigrants from many European lands, and the process has gone
on ever since. It is to be noted that, of the new blood thus acquired,
the greatest proportion has come from Dutch and German sources, and
the next greatest from Irish, while the Scandinavian element comes
third, and the only other of much consequence is French Huguenot. Thus
it appears that no new element of importance has been added to the
blood. Additions have been made to the elemental race-strains in much
the same proportion as these were originally combined.

Some latter-day writers deplore the enormous immigration to our shores
as making us a heterogeneous instead of a homogeneous people; but as a
matter of fact we are less heterogeneous at the present day than we
were at the outbreak of the Revolution. Our blood was as much mixed a
century ago as it is now. No State now has a smaller proportion of
English blood than New York or Pennsylvania had in 1775. Even in New
England, where the English stock was purest, there was a certain
French and Irish mixture; in Virginia there were Germans in addition.
In the other colonies, taken as a whole, it is not probable that much
over half of the blood was English; Dutch, French, German, and Gaelic
communities abounded.

But all were being rapidly fused into one people. As the Celt of
Cornwall and the Saxon of Wessex are now alike Englishmen, so in 1775
Hollander and Huguenot, whether in New York or South Carolina, had
become Americans, undistinguishable from the New Englanders and
Virginians, the descendants of the men who followed Cromwell or