When we cross the line which separates the United States from Canada we find a national mechanism at work which converts immigrants of alien nationalities into loyal Canadians. In Canada, however, our attention is arrested by an example which illustrates the persistence and the strength of the force which perpetuates a national spirit. The ancestors of the French Canadians began to settle in the province of Quebec early in the seventeenth century, 150 years before the Canadian national mill was set agoing by Englishmen. The French settlers never passed through that mill. They came, for the greater part, from the north-west of France, and although speaking a different tongue, adopting a different religion, and following different customs, they were yet in point of race not essentially different from the English founders of Canada. Yet the descendants of these early French settlers, now numbering well over a million and a half, and although forming but a small island in the midst of an English-speaking ocean for more than a century and a half, have maintained their sense of separateness--their national frontiers--intact. There is no question here of a racial frontier as yet, but were this national isolation of French Canadians to become permanent, then in course of time a racial differentiation would be produced within their territory. When we turn our faces westward and cross the Rocky Mountains we find the minds of the white inhabitants, along the whole stretch of the Pacific coast, occupied with a racial problem. They have erected a racial barrier to keep out the native peoples of Asia. The native of India is excluded just as strictly as the Chinaman or Japanese. They are not excluded because of their speech or of their civilization, but because the people of the United States and of Canada are conscious of a certain feeling of difference--call it race prejudice, race antipathy, or what you will. It is a conscious or subconscious state of feeling which rebels against racial fusion. RACIAL PROBLEMS OF SPANISH AMERICA