The American people has been and is being made by exactly this process. We are in the midst of the making of the “American.” It does not yet appear what he shall be, but one thing is certain, he is not to be of any particular racial type now distinguishable. Saxon, Teuton, and Kelt, Latin and Slav--to say nothing of any appreciable contribution by yellow and brown races as yet negligible in this aspect of the question--each of the races that we now know on this soil will have its share of “ancestorial” responsibility for the “typical American” that is to be. NOT RACIAL, BUT CULTURAL Leaving for the long future, then, the evolution of the hereditary type, is there so soon something “home grown,” some “integration of culture,” that is peculiarly our own? Every American knows in his heart that however subtle and elusive, however difficult of definition, there is something real that distinguishes “America.” In the attempt to fix the boundaries for the new Poland, the Peace Conference sought in vain for some limits of language or of political unity on which to base their demarcation. It came down at last to a simple question: “_Do you want to be Poles?_” And the question was enough. Who doubts the answer to the question: _Do you want to be American?_ There is something more than love of home, something higher than the liking of a cat for the warm place under the familiar stove, that stirs the heart of every normal American when he sees the Stars and Stripes. The alien who declares it his intention to become a citizen of the United States may not be able to put it in words, but he means, and he knows that he means, something real and vital, recognizes a substantial distinction, when he says that _he wants to be an American_! There must be, there is, there has been always, in the midst of the racial chaos which to-day constitutes perhaps our greatest social problem, something that may be called nationally even if not yet racially _American_; something indigenous on this soil as on no other. It belongs to us. Up to a time beginning a quarter of a century ago, when the so-called “new immigration” from Southeastern Europe and southern Russia set in in full flood, and now anew in the experiences of the World War, it was and has again become, a thing shared by all of our racial groups and elements--_peculiarly American_. It answers the test set forth by Professor Weatherly in the paper already quoted, of the completion of the nationalizing process: “... when the things of the spirit are held in common and cherished by all, even if some specific ethnic or linguistic differences survive.” Or, in the words which he attributes to Renan: To have a common glory in the past, a common will in the present; to have done great things together, to desire to do still greater--these are the essential conditions for being _a People_.