Disappearance of the American.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XL, Issue 20, 13 May 1908, Page 37

Disappearance of the American.

The genuine American of Anglo-Saxon blood is rapidly vanishing from the face of the earth, and will eventually be as extinct as the Huron or Iroquois, declares Viscount d’Avenel. The descendants of other nations are supplanting the Anglo-Saxon in the United States, we are told, and “George Washington, if he should rise from his grave, would find himself much more at home in London than in New York.” In a somewhat exhaustive article in the leading literary organ in Paris, the Revue des Deux Mondes, translated for the “Literary Digest,” he sets out to prove by a long array of statistics his assertion that the Americans of the present day are Britisn and Anglo-Saxon merely in their language The population of the large towns is made up mostly of various European continental elements. Out of the two million inhabitants of Chicago, for instance, only 375,000 are Americans. There has been a gradual change in the nationality of the European immigrants who have sought this shore. From 1840 to 1860 it was reckoned that 43 per centof the newcomers were Irish and 35 per eeut. Germans. Compare this with the state of things from 1901 to 1906. The Irish and Germans each make up 5 per cent, of the immigrants. The remaining 90 per cent, consists of a heterogeneous crowd, 28 per cent, being Italians, 27 percent. Austrians and Hungarians, 20 per eent. Russians or Poles. All these immigrants are prolific and multiply quickly, while American families have few children or none at all. Viscount d’Avenel thus summarises his views: “The descendants of the 10,000,000 Anglo-Saxons by whom the United States was populated in 1830 form no more than an insignificant minority in the bosom of the present gigantic Republic. They will end by occupying no more permanent a place than the aborigines whom they so obstinately repressed, and who are now dying off on their western reserves. While these latter are perishing in misery, their conquerors are threatened with extinction through their very prosperity.

He thus dwells upon what our President has styled “race suicide,” as a con

tributing cause to the decay of the American race: “I do not pretend to hold up my own country as a pattern, for it is the least prolific of nations. But it is scarcely fair to make a comparison between France and the United States on this point. If the States were as well furnished with men as France is there would be 700,090,000 inhabitants in the Republic. Even if America were as densely populated as Massachusetts it would contain 1,200,000,000 people, and if it were populated as thickly as Belgium it would count more inhabitants than the whole of the present human race.”

“The sterility of the genuine Ameri cans is something appalling,” he writes. Vet the American "speaks in terms of eulogy of large families, just as an intide) might speak sympathetically of religion.’’ But there is no excuse, he says, for “race suicide” in the I nited States, or, at least, much less than there is in France: “The better-class American, descendant of the strong race of original colonists, openly despises the wonderfully rapid multiplication of the foreign immigrant family. He pities the parents and thinks that reckless improvidence and po verty is concerned in it. ‘An inferior

race,’ he scornfully declares, ‘is always prolific.’ Yet it should be noticed that t lie material conditions under which the struggle for life is carried on are much more favorable in America than in France. Everything seems formed to promote the development of the population, the fields of activity are boundless, the territory is vast and land cheap, while an energetic man in our country is bounded by conditions from which it is hard for him to free himself.”