It will not do to assume, as is sometimes done apparently, that mere residence in the United States is enough to make Americans of foreign immigrants or their children. America is something more than merely a section of the earth’s surface. It is a set of standards, customs, ideals, institutions, mores, embodied and personified in a group of people. Like many other of the deepest things in life they would be very hard to enumerate or describe, yet their existence is none the less sure. They are exemplified more completely in some persons than in others, and he who most thoroughly personifies them is the truest American. Historically, they have been associated with a certain physical strain, with which many of them appear to be inherently connected. Real assimilation means adoption into this spiritual inheritance. The only way it can be brought about is through close, intimate, constant association with those in whom it is embodied. The agencies of assimilation then, in addition to the physical one of race blending, are those things which further contact and association between the newcomer and those who are truly Americans. Professors Jenks and Lauck give a list of such causes or influences.[362] The list might perhaps be amplified, but as it stands it is an enumeration of forces which contribute to interrace association. It is not essential that the influence of the American upon the immigrant be an intentional, or even a conscious, one. Many of the most powerful forces are unobserved. The foreigner is very much aware of the differences between himself and his American neighbors, and the laws of imitation work strongly. But to have these forces work, there must be contact. Under the modern conditions which surround the immigrant this contact or association is all too often wholly lacking, or very meager. The entire life of many of our foreign-born and the youth of their children is spent in compact colonies, where, except for a few externals, the atmosphere is much more suggestive of the old world than of the new. The conditions of the old home are reproduced with the utmost possible fidelity, though often with a loss of much of the charm. So far as there is any social life, it is almost wholly confined within the boundaries of race. Even in the industrial life of to-day, as has been pointed out, there is practically no contact with Americanizing influences. It is really a wonder that the aliens are Americanized at all. When we stop to consider that in Massachusetts and New Jersey there are only two natives for every foreigner, and that many of these natives are of foreign parentage, we realize how slight are the chances for assimilation. It would be almost the task of a lifetime for two Americans to thoroughly Americanize a native peasant from a backward district of southeastern Europe, if they gave their whole time to it.