In the absence of any especially trained or officially dedicated class, the American people in the mass provides an amazing quantity of not impossible material out of which legislators and consuls may be made--just as it might equally well be made into whatever should happen to be required. And this fact strikes at the root of a common misapprehension in the minds of foreigners as to the constitution of the American people, a misapprehension which is fostered by what is written by other foreigners after inadequate observation. Much is thus written of the so-called heterogeneousness of the people of America. The Englishman who visits the United States for a few weeks only, commonly comes away with an idea that the New Yorker is the American people; whereas we have seen why it is that good American authorities maintain that in all the width and depth of the continent there is no aggregation of persons so little representative of the American people as a whole as the inhabitants of New York. After the Englishman has been in the United States for some months or a year or two, he grows bewildered and reaches the conclusion that there is no common American type--nothing but a patchwork of unassimilated units. In which conclusion he is just as mistaken as he was at first. There does exist a clearly defined and homogeneous American type. Let us suppose that all the negroes had been swept as with some vast net down and away into the Gulf of Mexico; that the Irishmen had been gathered out of the cities and deposited back into the Atlantic; that the Germans had been rounded up towards their fellows in Chicago and Milwaukee and then tipped gently into Lake Michigan, while the Scandinavians, having been assembled in Minnesota, had been edged courteously over the Canadian border;--when all this had been done, there would still remain the great American People. Of this great People there would remain certain local variations--in parts of the South, in New England, on the plains--but each clearly recognisable as a variety only, differing but superficially and in substance possessing well-defined all the generic and specific attributes of the race.