To grant every year citizenship in a new state to a great number of men born and educated in distant lands, who come stuffed with ideas and tendencies, opinions which correspond in no wise with the utterly different situation they find in the new country; to give them political rights which they do not want or give a thought to; to make them, almost by force, the pillars of a political constitution which they generally do not understand; to hope to transform them in a flash from subjects of ancient European monarchies into citizens of young American republics—is not all this to do violence to the practical ideas of government, and to multiply the already great difficulties among which every representative régime works, without any compensating advantage, not even that of planting the immigrants firmly in the new country? The vast multitudes which are to-day crossing from Europe to America no longer go, as they did once, in search of liberty beyond the ocean. They go in search of higher salaries, an easier and larger existence, and greater probability of bettering themselves. To open to the children of immigrants on the same terms as to home-born children the high schools, the professions, and the public offices—in short, all the roads by which the son of a peasant or artisan can climb to the higher _bourgeoisie_—is a surer means of planting firmly in the country the crowds carried to America on the wave of emigration than the concession to them of electoral rights. And that is just what the states of South America, with their practical spirit, have done and are doing.