The greatness of the Anglo-Saxon contribution to America--the gift greater than all their other great gifts--was the conception of a state making over the people who came here, and made over by them. By the end of the Revolution, power and prestige were in the hands of the Anglo-Saxon majority; and in three successive instruments they destroyed the idea of Anglo-Saxon superiority: the Declaration of Independence, the Ordnance of 1787, the Constitution. "Becoming" was not an ideal and it was not the base of Anglo-Saxon society in England; the concept of change and "becoming" was based on actuality; on what was happening all over the colonial dominion. People were becoming American, even before a new nation was born. All that followed--the vast complexity of creating America, would have been impossible without that first supreme act of creative self-sacrifice. When the statesmen of our Revolutionary period established the principles of statehood and naturalization and citizenship in terms of absolute equality, they knew the risk they ran. In Pennsylvania the official minutes were printed in both English and German; in Maryland the Catholics were dominant; there were still some influential Dutch along the upper Hudson who might secede from New York. On the western boundary, unsettled, uneasy, lay the Spaniards and the French. There was danger of division, everywhere; but the great descendants of the English immigrants did not withdraw. Their principle was equality; since men were born free, they could _become_ equal if artificial barriers were removed. The statesmen of that day declared for America; they knew that men did not, in this country, remain Dutch or Portuguese; but grew into something else. With their own eyes they had seen it happen. They pledged their lives and sacred honor that it would happen again. So, if ever we re-write history to prove that all the other nations contributed nothing and failed to become Americans, we will also have to write it down that the Anglo-Saxons failed more miserably than the others. For the great idea, the practical dynamics of equality, was theirs; they set it in motion, guarded it, and saw it triumph. In the next ten years it will be impossible to extemporize an immigration policy for the United States. The world economy will change all around us; the dreadful alternations of plenty and starvation may be adjusted and controlled; we may enter a world order in which we will be responsible for a given number of souls, and some of these may be admitted to our country. By that time we will have learned that nationalist fascism and international communism are powerless here; and no one but professional haters of America will be left to bait the foreigners and persecute the alien.