The native American by the middle of the nineteenth century was rapidly acquiring distinct characteristics. Derived from the Saxon and Danish parts of the British Isles and being almost purely Nordic he was by reason of a differential selection due to a new environment beginning to show physical peculiarities of his own slightly variant from those of his English forefathers and corresponding rather with the idealistic Elizabethan than with the materialistic Hanoverian Englishman. The Civil War, however, put a severe, perhaps fatal, check to the development and expansion of this splendid type by destroying great numbers of the best breeding stock on both sides and by breaking up the home ties of many more. If the war had not occurred these same men with their descendants would have populated the Western States instead of the racial nondescripts who are now flocking there. There is every reason to believe that the native stock would have continued to maintain a high rate of increase if there had been no immigration of foreign laborers in the middle of the nineteenth century and that the actual population of the United States would be fully as large as it is now but would have been almost exclusively native American and Nordic. The prosperity that followed the war attracted hordes of newcomers who were welcomed by the native Americans to operate factories, build railroads and fill up the waste spaces—“developing the country” it was called. These new immigrants were no longer exclusively members of the Nordic race as were the earlier ones who came of their own impulse to improve their social conditions. The transportation lines advertised America as a land flowing with milk and honey and the European governments took the opportunity to unload upon careless, wealthy and hospitable America the sweepings of their jails and asylums. The result was that the new immigration, while it still included many strong elements from the north of Europe, contained a large and increasing number of the weak, the broken and the mentally crippled of all races drawn from the lowest stratum of the Mediterranean basin and the Balkans, together with hordes of the wretched, submerged populations of the Polish Ghettos. Our jails, insane asylums and almshouses are filled with this human flotsam and the whole tone of American life, social, moral and political has been lowered and vulgarized by them. With a pathetic and fatuous belief in the efficacy of American institutions and environment to reverse or obliterate immemorial hereditary tendencies, these newcomers were welcomed and given a share in our land and prosperity. The American taxed himself to sanitate and educate these poor helots and as soon as they could speak English, encouraged them to enter into the political life, first of municipalities and then of the nation.