But we must not forget the innumerable Anglo-Saxons who have founded families in the Argentine and in Chili, and have brought wealth to those countries; nor the Germans in Southern Brazil, nor the Asiatics of the Peruvian seaboard. Iberians, Indians, Latins, Anglo-Saxons, and Orientals all mingle in America; a babel of races, so mixed that it is impossible to discover the definite outlines of the future type. It is useless to look for unity of race in such a country. And even in the United States the confused invasion of Russian Jews and Southern Italians is little by little undermining the primitive Anglo-Saxon unity. This confusion of races in the North and the South leaves two traditions, the Anglo-Saxon and the Iberian. By force of assimilation these traditions are transforming the new races. Englishmen and Spaniards disappear, but the two moral inheritances survive. The Latin tradition is not far to seek in the {285} Americans of the South. They are not exclusively either Spanish or Portuguese; the legacy received from Spain is modified by persistent influences of French and Italian origin. From Mexico to La Plata, by long continued and extensive action, the Roman laws, Catholicism, and the ideas of France have given a uniform aspect to the American conscience. Laws of Spanish origin prevail in South America; they have formed the rigid framework of civil life. These laws, in spite of strong feudal elements, are of Roman origin. Under the influence of Roman law Alfonso X. unified Spanish legislation, during the first half of the thirteenth century; three centuries later the Spaniards colonised America. The _Partidas_, that vast encyclopædia of law and collection of Castilian laws in particular, is a Roman code. It confirmed the individualist sense of property as against the Spanish forms of collectivism; it reinforced the power of the _paterfamilias_ in the austere Iberian family; it consecrated equality, authorising marriage between free men and the serfs formerly banished from the State; and it adopted the Roman formalism.