It would be foolhardy to deny that, at the present time, there are immense unassimilated elements in our population,—immigrants of the first or second generation, possibly even of the third. Every foreign-American society, be it Irish, German, Italian, Slovak, or any other, whatever its aims and purposes, is a standing evidence of a group of people who recognize certain affiliations or loyalties which are foreign to the out-and-out American. The number of such organizations is legion, and the membership, if it could be reckoned, would reach an imposing total. The recent protests by Irish-American societies against the production of certain plays by the Irish Players, the German-American demonstration which broke up the peace meeting in Carnegie Hall on December 12, 1911, as well as the German-American meetings held four years previously to protest against the enforcement in New York of what was styled a Puritan Sunday, the discrimination of the Russian government against certain of our citizens—these and a host of similar events occurring from time to time emphasize the existence within this country of racial contingents which have not become indistinguishably blended into the American people. If, for any conceivable reason, the United States should be drawn into any European international complication, she would find that hosts of her citizens, as well as mere residents, displayed a divided allegiance, of which the preponderance might easily be on the side of some foreign nation. As long as such conditions as these prevail, it is idle to claim that assimilation is complete. Assimilation is a matter of the force of environment pitted against that of heredity. The protracted discussion as to the relative influence of these two factors continues unsettled. But the claim that the second generation of immigrants are thoroughly assimilated seems to deny the importance of either. To assert that the children of foreign parents, brought up in a home made by foreigners though located in the United States, are in the end equally American with children born of native parents, and reared in a home upon which the American type is indelibly stamped, is to claim that heredity is of no account whatever, and that the only environment which has weight is that rather vague environment of “country.” It is to say that a man’s character is solely the result of the region in which he lives, without reference to either birth or breeding. It seems hardly credible that such an assertion should be seriously made. It is more likely that those who say that the children of the foreign-born are assimilated really mean that they are nearly enough assimilated for all practical purposes.