It was Oliver Wendell Holmes, who, years ago, when asked by an anxious
mother at what age the education of a child ought to begin, remarked in
reply that it should begin about one hundred and fifty years before the
child is born. It has so proved with us; and the fact is to-day in
evidence that this statement of Dr. Holmes should be accepted as an
undeniable political aphorism. So far from seven or fourteen years
making an American citizen, fully and thoroughly impregnated with
American ideals to the exclusion of all others, our experience is that
it requires at least three generations to eliminate what may be termed
the "hyphen" in citizenship. Not in the first, nor in the second, and
hardly in the third, generation, does the immigrant cease to be an
Irish-American, or a French-American, or a German-American, or a
Slavonic-American, or yet a Dago. Nevertheless, in process of tune,
those of the Caucasian race do and will become Americans. Ultimately
their descendants will be free from the traditions and ideals, so to
speak, ground in through centuries passed under other conditions. Not so
the Ethiopian. In his case, we find ourselves confronted with a
situation never contemplated in that era of political dreams and
scriptural science in which our institutions received shape. Stated
tersely and in plain language, so far as the African is concerned--the
cause and, so to speak, the motive of the great struggle of 1861 to
1865--we recognize the presence in the body politic of a vast alien mass
which does not assimilate and which cannot be absorbed. In other words,
the melting-pot theory came in sharp contact with an ethnological fact,
and the unexpected occurred. The problem of African servitude was solved
after a fashion; but in place of it a race issue of most uncompromising
character evolved itself.

A survivor of the generation which read "Uncle Tom's Cabin" as it week
by week appeared,--fresh to-day from Massachusetts with its Lawrence