For the European system stood against _becoming_; its objective was to remain, to be still, to stand. Its ancient greatness and the tone of time which made it lovely, both came from this faith in the steady long-abiding changelessness of human institutions. All that it possessed was built to endure for ever; its cathedrals, its prisons, its symbols, its systems--including the symbols and the systems by which it denied freedom to its people. Each national-racial-religious complex of Europe was a triple anchor against change; it prevented men from drifting as the great winds of revolution and reform swept over Europe. Nor were men permitted to change, as they pleased. Nations waged war and won land, but neither the Czars nor the German Emperors thought of the Poles as their own people; the Poles were irrevocably Poles, excluded from the nobler society of Russians, Austrians and Germans. Religious societies made converts, but looked with fear or hatred or suspicion against the very people from whom the converts came--the Jew was irretrievably a Jew, the Catholic a Catholic. In each country one religion was uppermost, the rest tolerated. In each country one folk-group was dominant, the rest tolerated or persecuted. And in each country one class--the same class--ruled, and all other classes served. By ones or twos, men and women might be accepted into the established church, marry into the dominant race, rise to the governing class; but the exceptions proved nothing. The European believed in his _station_ in life, his civil _status_, the _standing_ of his family in the financial or social world. The Englishman settling in Timbuctoo remained an Englishman because the Englishman at home remained a middle-class bank clerk or "not a gentleman" or a marquess; and while an alien could become a subject of the King, he never for a moment imagined that he could become an Englishman--any more than a Scot. The English knew that names change; men do not. _Only when they came to America, they did._ They did because the basic American system, the dynamics of becoming American, rejected the racialism of Europe; it rejected aggressive nationalism by building a new nation; it rejected an established religion; and almost in passing it destroyed the class-system. To the familiar European systems of damnation--by original sin, by economic determinism, by pre-natal influence--has been added a new one--damnation by racial inferiority; the Chamberlain-Wagner-Nietzsche-Rosenberg-Hitler myth of the superior race-nation means in practise that whoever is not born German is damned to serve Germany; there is no escape because the inferiority is inherent. This is the European class-system carried to its loftiest point.