There is another great promise to this country also through its immigrant population, which may not be announced as a fact, but which certainly has a great deal of probability in it. Mr. Darwin, who in tracing the descent of species seemed to interest himself in the descent of everything else, explained once the method by which forests suddenly appear upon some tracts of land which apparently had been long destitute of any of the larger varieties of vegetation. He found upon examination of one such tract that while the arboreal shoots which had first come into view that year were small, they nevertheless had enormous roots. Ploughing and cultivation had kept the soil above these roots broken for a great many years, or cattle in grazing over the ground had kept everything nipped short. Nevertheless the roots or germs were there, and through the very process of repression seemed to accumulate a strength which they put forth, when they were allowed to do so, as if they were making up for lost time, which was exactly the deduction which Mr. Darwin made in longer and more scholarly form. It is known to breeders that the strain of families of various species is frequently improved by infusion of the blood of an animal of the sort commonly known as a “runt;” that is, one which has been stunted in its growth. The average immigrant is a man who has been repressed for generations and perhaps for centuries. When his opportunity for development comes he really seems to have the capacity to make up for lost time. There is no other way of explaining the wonderful improvement in many thousands of American families of foreign extraction. There have been some amusing results of efforts of men, suddenly become prominent and deservedly so, in tracing their ancestry. They learned what Burns once expressed about himself after he had made similar investigations:
“Through scoundrels’ blood My race has crept, e’er since the flood.”
The wonderful virility and prosperity of the Hebrew in this country, as well as in those European countries where he has been allowed a chance beside his fellow-men, cannot be explained except upon this theory of accumulated strength during long periods of repression.