than the Irish--a circumstance due in great measure to their differing
in language from the mass of their new neighbors. This cause of
isolation is gradually losing its weight, the recognition of the
German tongue by State legislatures, municipalities, etc. being less
common than formerly, notwithstanding the immense immigratior so
calculated to extend it.

While assimilation has been growing more complete, and a fixed
resultant becoming more discernible, the ingredients of this ethnic
medley do not seem to have materially varied in their proportions
since the beginning of the century. They present a tolerably close
parallel to the like process in Northern France, where Celt and Teuton
combined in nearly equal numbers, with, as in our case, a limited
local infusion of the Norse. The result cannot, however, be identical,
the French lacking our Anglo-Saxon substratum, with its valuable
traditions and habitudes of political thought. The balance between
impulse and conservatism has never been, in this country, long or
seriously disturbed, and is probably as sound now as a hundred
years ago. In the discussions of the twenty years which embrace our
Revolutionary period we find abundance of theory, but they were never
carried by abstractions out of sight of the practical. Our publicists
were not misled by convictions of the "infinite perfectibility of
the human mind," the motive proclaimed by Condorcet, writing in sweet
obliviousness of the guillotine, as explaining "how much more pure,
accurate and profound are the principles upon which the constitution
and laws of France have been formed than those which directed the
Americans." The lack of this equilibrium among the pure, and, as we
may venture to term them, the untrained races, we have occasional
opportunities of noting on our own soil when for a passing cause they
resort to isolated action.