The upper classes, Anglo-Saxon in origin, fear that contemporary immigration, coming as it does from peoples of alien race, from the south or east of Europe, may modify or enfeeble those great moral and political qualities to which they attribute the greatness and prosperity of their nation. On the other hand, the federated workers see in these new arrivals, healthy and vigorous, but having fewer needs, a source of dangerous competition, which may have a disastrous influence on conditions of labour and payment. The stream of irrigation which is now setting in towards the United States, and which amounted in numbers to 800,000 in the year 1904, must necessarily therefore, as time goes on, turn aside in other directions, and as it will nowhere meet with more advantageous circumstances than in the Argentine, it will flow thither as it flows already, but in greater and greater numbers, resulting in a development of wealth and power superior to any hitherto known. Some persons, however, formulate certain reservations as to the consistency and the political and social value of nations formed by these human inundations, composed as they are of men of different races, having neither the same language, nor the same religion, nor the same customs; they doubt whether this new Babel can give birth to a national spirit sufficiently vigorous to impress a character of political and moral unity upon these new recruits. In order to prove that these fears are ill-founded, we have only to take the practical example furnished by the United States. Into this vast national crucible there poured, from the outset, the stream of emigration from Great Britain, Holland, France, and Spain; later came Scandinavians, Germans, Lithuanians, Poles, Hungarians, Italians, Syrians and Arabs. From the fusion of all these elements has issued a new race, homogeneous and powerful, with a strong national spirit which is known as “the American spirit,” and under that name has won the respect of the world. This result is neither accidental nor due to special antecedents; it is the consequence of a natural evolution, ably and intelligently directed. The European law, which attributes to the son the nationality of his father, may have had its justification in the past; to-day it is maintained only by force of tradition. Nationality and love of country are only an extension of the love of the family and the home; and these sentiments cannot, any more than others, be forced upon one by law. There can exist for a man only the home and the family in which he was born and bred. Doubtless he will feel himself attached to the home of his forbears by ties of sentiment and respect; but all the roots of his intimate feelings bind him to the home and the family into which he was born; they are in his blood, and thence he has received the first impressions which mould his character and imprint those characteristics which form his personality.