In historic times there have been sudden movements southward of European races for about seven hundred miles and all ended disastrously. The Lombards went south from upper Prussia to middle Italy at the level of Boston and disappeared in two hundred years. The Teutonic Goths went from the Baltic to Italy and Spain. They lasted sixty-two years in Italy. Eighty thousand Vandals with their families went down from Brandenburg to North Africa at the level of Virginia. They were annihilated by the climate in one hundred and eight years. The Burgundians disappeared in sixty years from Greece, as the Celts who had carried the Homeric sagas to Greece also disappeared. Rome was great while the Nordic Cisalpine Celt ruled it, and died forever with the Celt. Italian art ended at Florence, the southern boundary of Cisalpine Gaul. The Slav disappeared the same way from southeastern Europe and left only language traces to the Turanian and Semite there. No European race of pure blood has ever had grandchildren in the tropics.
The northern races of Europe die out with amazing rapidity in the northern United States. The Irish death rate at the level of New York is double the death rate in Ireland under much worse economic conditions; the death rate of the southern Italian and the southern Russian is much better in New York than it is in their European racial habitats.
In 1910 our English immigration was only six per cent. of the whole, and the Irish immigration is now negligible because there are no more people in Ireland to leave it, but we have seven million Slavs who came in during the ten years before the war. We have three million southern Italians, three million Poles, and hundreds of thousands of nondescript folk from all the back alleys of the old world. At an army camp in Massachusetts during the late war there were thirty languages other than English spoken, and seven thousand men there never had heard the term Anglo-Saxon. The extreme southern, eastern, and southeastern European hordes are overwhelming us, and these hordes never knew a single political principle that even remotely resembles what we understand as American principles. They come of races who were ruled, if they had any rule at all, by despots, but we shall make "Anglo-Saxons," Americans, or whatever you like to call the final metamorphosis we effect, out of these barbarians. Never! Even in a millenium. Centuries from today the Slav here will be a Slav, the Sicilian a Sicilian, the Russian a Russian, all with a veneer of American slang on the tongue of an eternal racial character. Whole counties of Pennsylvania are filled with Germans who have been here since before the Revolution and they have not so much as learned English yet. The Nordic peoples die out here. Only the dark-skinned southern Germans last with us; the sun kills out the red and blond in two or three generations. I recently went over fifty Irish families which I knew perfectly, and they have degenerated eighty-six per cent. numerically and otherwise in my own lifetime: killed off by the climate which keeps our southern states empty of white men. By two American censuses and one English we know that fifty per cent. of Washington's army was born in Ireland, but there are no Irish in the revolutionary societies because the Revolutionary Irish have disappeared.