The Maories--an immigrant race--were dying off in New Zealand when we landed there. The Indians of Mexico--another immigrant people--had themselves undergone decline, numerical and moral, when we first became acquainted with them. Are we English in turn to degenerate abroad, under pressure of a great natural law forbidding change? It is easy to say that the English in Old England are not a native but an immigrant race; that they show no symptoms of decline. There, however, the change was slight, the distance short, the difference of climate small. The rapidity of the disappearance of physical type is equaled at least, if not exceeded, by that of the total alteration of the moral characteristics of the immigrant races--the entire destruction of eccentricity, in short. The change that comes over those among the Irish who do not remain in the great towns is not greater than that which overtakes the English handworkers, of whom some thousands reach America each year. Gradually settling down on land, and finding themselves lost in a sea of intelligence, and freed from the inspiring obstacles of antiquated institutions and class prejudice, the English handicraftsman, ceasing to be roused to aggressive Radicalism by the opposition of sinister interests, merges into the contented homestead settler, or adventurous backwoodsman. Greater even than this revolution of character is that which falls upon the Celt. Not only is it a fact known alike to physiologists and statisticians, that the children of Irish parents born in America are, physically, not Irish, Americans, but the like is true of the moral type: the change in this is at least as sweeping. The son of Fenian Pat and bright-eyed Biddy is the normal gaunt American, quick of thought, but slow of speech, whom we have begun to recognize as the latest product of the Saxon race, when housed upon the Western prairies, or in the pine-woods of New England. For the moral change in the British workman it is not difficult to account: the man who will leave country, home, and friends, to seek new fortunes in America, is essentially not an ordinary man. As a rule, he is above the average in intelligence, or, if defective in this point, he makes up for lack of wit by the possession of concentrativeness and energy. Such a man will have pushed himself to the front in his club, his union, or his shop, before he emigrates. In England he is somebody; in America he finds all hands contented; or, if not this, at all events too busy to complain of such ills as they profess to labor under. Among contented men, his equals both in intelligence and ambition, in a country of perfect freedom of speech, of manners, of laws, and of society, the occupation of his mind is gone, and he comes to think himself what others seem to think--a nobody; a man who no longer is a living force. He settles upon land; and when the world knows him no more, his children are happy corn-growers in his stead.