The foreigner who learns to speak the English language ever so well, though he may reside here almost a lifetime, if he does not learn to speak it _idiomatically_ correct, will not be influenced by it to any great extent in any of the various manners of which I have made mention, either as regards his features, character, habits, motions, thoughts, etc.; but, in spite of his "English," he will still be a foreigner. This foreigner's children, however, provided he does not influence them to the contrary through pride of his native tongue, and if reared under native influences, will become thorough Americans. There need be no fear, therefore, that immigration might bring to this country a permanent foreign element. Such elements, when they do come, are of a passing nature. Their offspring, in passing the crucial test of the English tongue, sink the foreigner into the all-absorbing element of the English idiom; and in so doing are merged into and become an integral part of the people of this country. They may come of whatever nation, from whatever land; no matter how they may appear, act, or speak, the English idiom will continue to make them Americans, in their children at least, in the future as it has in the past. There is thus in the centrifugal force which dominates the speech of Anglo-Saxons that which is a safeguard to the homogeneity as well as the institutions of this nation. An Anglo-Saxon cannot be a bondsman; his language forbids it. The centrifugal force which prevails with him does not permit fetters. The children of all foreigners born here and speaking the English language come under its spell. If language did not have this supreme influence, there is no other influence that would have prevented this country long ago from having become inhabited in special districts with permanent groups of people foreign to its aims and institutions, and alien to its genius, its character, and its customs. In districts where German is spoken as the principal language, as in some parts of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, it is not, with the native-born at least, the pure German language, but its idiomatic expression is that of the English tongue. People say, "It is the climate." We have every climate under the sun; yet in all that is essential the man from Maine is as thoroughly American as the one from Texas; the gold-digger in the frozen regions of the Yukon as the man of the orange-groves of Florida or California; the American fisherman on the Banks of Newfoundland as those on the Gulf of Mexico; the man who battles on the plains against the Indians as he who serves under the banner of the Republic and upholds its glory in foreign lands and seas. You can tell an American the moment you look at him. Yet if you ask some of them where their parents were born, you will hear strange tales of lands and peoples across the sea and far away.