What, after all, is Americanism? What is the destiny of America? What do we want it to be? What, in the great evolution of nations, is it bound to be? Until the average American meets and answers these questions squarely, we cannot settle the question of what races are best for the future of America. Miss Repplier quotes Dr. Horace Kallen as saying, “Only men who are alike in origin and spirit and not abstractly can be truly equal, and maintain that inward unanimity of action and outlook which makes a national life.” And, says Miss Repplier, rightly, “We have no mutual understanding, no common denominator.” We have not. The first Americans whose opportunity, yes, and whose _responsibility_ it was to produce these, have failed ignominiously to do so. “An Englishman,” says Miss Repplier, “knows that a Russian Jew cannot in five years or in twenty-five years become English; that his standards and ideals are not convertible into English standards and ideals. A Frenchman does not see in a Bulgarian or a Czech the making of another Frenchman.” True, but what is an American? Is he an Anglo-Saxon racial type, and if so, by what law? _Do we desire him to be this?_ I do not despise the conclusion of ethnologists, but they seem to have so few conclusions and so many theories. And the root of them seems to be, not experience, but apprehension. Meanwhile, I see all around me valiant Americans, Southern European by birth and tradition, Americans now in spirit and loyalty and _tendency_. These men and women have mastered the opportunity--for they had to seek and improve it themselves--to become assimilated. In spite of the thousands of their countrymen among us, still un-American, I am convinced of two things: That America _can control its own destiny_, that one of the greatest obstacles has been slothful neglect, another obstacle, nativism; and that the way to attain control of our destiny is by aggressive, not passive, Americanism. When this is under way, it will be easy enough to sort out and deal separately and finally with undesirable races and types or those that have no desire to become Americans.