But neither in the importation of exotic socialistic germs nor in the fungus-like growth of indigenous disaffection and corruption lay the only dangers of the Republic. The heterogeneous elements which made up the population of the United States had suffered a great and wholly unfortunate race-change since the foundation of the Government. At the close of the Revolution which separated the colonies from England the country was populated with a sparse but homogeneous people, possessing in an eminent degree the sterling virtues and the robust common-sense which characterize the Anglo-Saxon race. The freedom which these men won and had no capacity for abusing they felt would be safe forever in the hands of descendants sprung from their loins. The government they formed was exactly fitted for themselves and for a succeeding nation possessing their sense of order and their intelligence. But they saw a vast unexplored continent opening its wealth before them. Their numbers were but few for its conquest and reclamation. They felt the need of more men. Relying upon the freedom of the institutions they bequeathed and upon the virtue and vigor with which they endowed their heirs, they invited immigration from Europe. They took it for granted that the immigrants would be few in comparison with the native population, and that they would be absorbed and assimilated by the majority as snow-flakes falling in the ocean are absorbed by the great waters and made a part of them. At first the stream of immigration which flowed westward was no larger than they had anticipated, and gave cause for little fear, either by reason of its size or of the classes and races which composed it. But before the first fifty years of the Republic had passed, it became clear that the asylum which it offered was being taken advantage of chiefly by the Irish, and by the very worst portion of the Irish at that. They found their own little island too narrow for them, and flocked to the United States by the hundred thousand. Coming, the most of them, from the lowest ranks of a degraded and ignorant peasantry, they found themselves, in the United States as at home, in a position of inferiority in everything save citizenship. Clannish by race and religious prejudice, they brought with them all their insular and ethnic narrowness and exclusiveness, and remained up to the end of the chapter a class by themselves. Other nationalities sent immigrants who threw off their old allegiances upon touching American soil, became in fact as well as in name Americans, intermarried with Americans, and brought up their children to become wholly American in deed and aspiration. But the Irish seldom married outside their own race; they brought up their children to be first Catholic and then Irish as themselves; they remained, and their descendants after them to the third and fourth generation, as much Irishmen as their cousins who continued to inhabit Leinster and Munster.