There is a popular cyclopædia of names, called _Who's Who in America_, which contains brief biographies of some 16,395 living persons, who are supposed to be more or less distinguished, in one way or another, in the various regions in which they live. It includes the representatives of foreign governments in the United States, and some foreign authors and business men. It is not necessary to imagine that all who are admitted to this quasi-golden book of "Who's-who-dom" are really great or widely famous. There are perhaps many of whom we might inquire, Which is who, and why is he somewhat? But, after all, the book includes most of the successful lawyers, doctors, merchants, bankers, preachers, politicians, authors, artists, and teachers,--the people who are most influential in their local communities and best known to their fellow-citizens. The noteworthy fact is that 86.07 per cent are native Americans. I think that a careful examination of the record would show that a very large majority have at least three generations of American ancestry on one side or the other of the family. Of the men elected to the presidency of the United States there has been only one whose ancestors did not belong to America before the Revolution,--James Buchanan, whose father was a Scotch-Irish preacher who came to the New World in 1783. All but four of the Presidents of the United States could trace their line back to Americans of the seventeenth century. But it is not upon these striking facts of physical heredity that I would rest my idea of an American people, distinct and continuous, beginning a conscious life at some time antecedent to 1764 and still guiding the development of the United States. I would lay far more stress upon intellectual and spiritual heredity, that strange process of moral generation by which the qualities of the Spirit of America have been communicated to millions of immigrants from all parts of the world. Since 1820 about twenty-six million persons have come to the United States from foreign lands. At the present moment, in a population which is estimated at about ninety millions, there are probably between thirteen and fifteen millions who are foreign-born. It is an immense quantity for any nation to digest and assimilate, and it must be confessed that there are occasional signs of local dyspepsia in the large cities. But none the less it may be confidently affirmed that the foreign immigration of the past has been thoroughly transformed into American material, and that the immigration of the present is passing through the same process without any alarming interruption.