Chapter XVII: Our Neighbors on the South

Unlike Canada on our north, the countries south of the Rio Grande have been relatively little influenced by Nordic culture, to say nothing of anything resembling a Nordic conquest. The outlying territories of Mexico which were annexed to the United States were nearly empty lands and present Mexican influences in the Southwest are matters of more recent date.

Latin America is one of the major divisions of the World, and from the present point of view should no more be discussed as a unit than could Europe or Asia. Its original population represents one of the great racial divisions of mankind. Its twenty different nations now speak several different languages, and embrace representatives of all the important races of both hemispheres.

The general area gets such unity as it possesses from the Latin and Roman Catholic aspect of its culture as contrasted with the Protestant, Anglo-Saxon culture of America north of the Mexican border. This Latin civilization was originally Spanish (in Brazil Portuguese), but since the era of the revolutions which threw off the Spanish yoke, the Spanish influence has become more and more negligible, and locally has been somewhat supplanted by the French, and, to a small extent, by the Italian influence.

Latin America was never colonized at all in the sense that North America was colonized. English settlers with their families came to the New World to found homes, but the early history of Latin America was that of a series of plundering and proselyting expeditions, and such of the adventurers as tarried were usually men without families who had no desire to stay a day longer than was necessary to acquire a fortune and return to Europe. Add to these the military forces who came under compulsion, and the missionaries, administrators, and concessionaires of all kinds and one has the bulk of the early European immigration.

Under these circumstances the number of women who came with their husbands was naturally small, and most of the Europeans took Indian wives, frequently several of them, thus laying the basis for the half-breed population of the present day. In Paraguay, for instance, some of the colonial rulers are said to have had fifty or a hundred native concubines. If every descendant of these matings carries the Spanish name but has married mainly with Indian stock in the ten or fifteen generations since, it is easy to understand that present-day families may bear the names of hidalgos, of whose genetic traits they have virtually none.

The number of European immigrants was never large. During the sixteenth century, a period of active exploitation, the entire movement from Spain to America is thought to have represented only about 1000 or 1500 persons a year. With a high death rate, and the disposition on their part to return as soon as possible, there was no opportunity for the Spaniard to establish the basis of a civilization built upon his own race.

By 1553 foundling half-breeds numbered thousands in Spanish America and the viceroy Mendoza was obliged to establish an orphan school for them. Even at the end of the eighteenth century, when Humboldt visited Mexico City, he remarked that of the European-born Spaniards there, not one-tenth were women. The proportion of women must certainly have been still smaller in the provincial towns and on the frontiers.

So far as the present population goes back to the early days of Spanish dominion, it may be said to be Spanish by name and Indian by blood. The families, which in many Spanish American countries have social prestige because of descent from the conquerors and rulers of the Colonial Period, must therefore attach all importance to the family name, and little or none to the many other lines of descent which have entered into the composition of their present generation.

Honorable exception should be made in almost every one of the Spanish American republics of a small group of Whites that has consistently maintained its racial integrity and upheld intelligent ideals of racial progress, under most difficult conditions. In many of the countries, too, there are groups of far-seeing intellectuals who are working for the adoption of wise immigration policies, presenting sound and constructive measures of eugenic reform, and striving to awaken their fellow countrymen to the fact that a nation's capital is, in the last analysis, biological, and that permanent and satisfactory progress is possible only to a people with a healthy family life.

In many of the Latin American countries the Whites, or those who pass as such (for they have, in most cases, a large proportion of Indian blood) form an oligarchy or ruling caste occupying the higher positions in the political and ecclesiastical worlds. They also constitute the land-owning and professional classes, while commerce and industry are largely in the hands of foreigners or their descendants. In many cases these foreign immigrants marry into the best native families, and thus their children become a part of the ruling caste.

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Mexico. The restriction of European immigration into the United States under the National Origins Quota cutting off what had been the principal source of unskilled labor had an unexpected and undesirable effect in encouraging immigration from nearby countries of the Western Hemisphere, which were not under the quota, and particularly from Mexico. Industries accustomed to depend upon cheap, ignorant, and docile workers from Mediterranean or Alpine countries turned to the illiterate Indians on the South as a ready substitute. The stream of arrivals across the border, more illegal than legal, soon brought into the United States more than a million Mexicans. Only the unexpected depression beginning in 1929 stemmed this tide and apparently prevented Mexico from reconquering peacefully, by an immigrant invasion, the territory it had lost by the decision of war in 1848.

Since the sixteen million residents of Mexico are the nearest large body of people in a position to supply immigrants to the United States and ready to do so, a study of their composition is of the highest importance at the present time. Mexico at the time of the Spanish Conquest had seen the rise and fall of several relatively high native civilizations, and that of the Aztecs, which was destroyed by the Spaniards, had many noteworthy features. The combination of brutality and piety which dominated the conquerors led to the extermination as far as possible of every salient feature of the native culture. The country was, thereafter, exploited ruthlessly by the Spaniards, but the Spanish civilization, such as it was, did not succeed in establishing itself in this foreign soil. The history of the last four centuries has been a history of the gradual absorption of the foreigners by the Indian element. This is true alike of race and culture.

The large native population found here by the Spaniards was quickly reduced in numbers. A Spanish priest enumerates ten plagues which had decimated the people during his time, that is, during the first quarter of a century after the conquest. First the smallpox, brought by a Negro in one of Narvaez' ships. It is said to have destroyed more than half of the people in many of the provinces. The others were: the slaughter in the capture of Mexico City, the famine resulting from the widespread warfare; the abuses of overseers of the towns given in vassalage; the heavy tributes; the tremendous abuses in connection with the mines; the reconstruction of Mexico City by forced labor; the traffic in branded slaves; the abuses of transportation, with Indians as human beasts of burden; and the factional warfare among the Spaniards themselves, in which the Indians bore the brunt of the fighting. To these should be added particularly the other infectious diseases that the Spaniards introduced, such as tuberculosis and syphilis, as to which the aboriginal inhabitants had not the slightest immunity or resistance, through previous racial experience.

Under such conditions the native population of the hemisphere was probably reduced by 50 or 75 per cent in a few generations, and in the West Indies it was exterminated. Since then it has been steadily regaining ground on the mainland, though not in the islands, in many of which the Negro has replaced it.

The number of Spaniards who came at any time to Mexico is placed at 300,000 at the outside. Many of these certainly did not remain in the country and few of them brought their families. Under the conditions that existed in Mexico and the other conquered territories, it was universally recognized that the situation was not suitable for a white woman. While the Spanish Government encouraged men to take their wives out from Spain, few of them cared to do so, and probably most of the men who came to the colonies were unmarried. Spain put insuperable difficulties in the way of unmarried women who wanted to emigrate, so that Spanish women throughout the history of Mexico were few. The resulting population is therefore made up of the offspring of the Indians and of a few Spanish men mated to Indian women. Most of the Mexican population is still pure or nearly pure Indian. There is a considerable hybrid element which does most of the talking, and a negligible element that can be considered white in the strict sense of the term.

Mexican statistics commonly designate about 10 per cent of the population as white. But most of these have much Indian blood, and recent students doubt whether 3 per cent are properly to be described as white. Much of this genuine white element is in Mexico City, though the various states have their local and reputable white aristocracies, of which that in Yucatan is conspicuous for the maintenance of high standards of racial integrity.

The Mexican revolution which began in 1810 dislodged the overseas Spanish and substituted exploitation by the local hybrid group. Since then the general trend has been toward the rise to control of the Indians. The last period of revolution, which began in 1910 and may be said to be still in progress, has been marked by attempts to take away from the hybrid oligarchy the immense land properties which it had obtained and to distribute them to the Indians. While this has met with many difficulties, and has been realized only to a small extent, it has been at least the avowed objective of most of the revolutionists in the past two or three decades.

During recent years there has been a glorification of the Mexican Indian and his culture by North American writers. No doubt the Mexican Indian is well suited to his environment, and his traditional habits are well suited to him. This does not mean, however, that either has any important contribution to make to the United States which would be realized by a northward mass migration of agricultural and industrial serfs. On the contrary, the Mexican immigration to the United States, which is made up overwhelmingly of the poorer Indian element, has brought nothing but disadvantages. It has created, particularly in the Southwestern States, an exploited peasant class unconformable with the principles of American civilization. This population, neither physically nor mentally up to the prevailing standards, is producing a large contribution to the future American race, since every one of its numerous children born in the States becomes an American citizen by birth.

Tests made in the schools of southern California, in which the language handicap was discounted as far as possible, indicate that the average Mexican child was about as far below the average Negro child in abstract intellect as the average Negro child was below the average white child.

Physically, the race is conspicuous by its low resistance to tuberculosis, which has exterminated so large a part of the native population of the Western Hemisphere during the last four centuries. The New World had not been subject to tuberculosis and therefore offered a fertile field for the germs of this disease. The population of the Old World had been ravaged by it for many centuries, and in each generation the low resistants had been killed off so that a more immune stock had been gradually produced by natural selection.

Such studies as have been made in the Southwestern States indicate that the average Mexican family is at least half again as large as the average white family. Thus there is every reason to expect that, without a sharp limitation of such immigration, the Southwest will become more and more Mexicanized.

By 1928 Los Angeles County had more than a quarter of a million Mexicans, and the City of Los Angeles had the largest Mexican population of any city in the world, with the exception of Mexico City. Whole industries and whole agricultural areas had come to think themselves largely dependent on Mexican labor, while millions of American citizens were out of employment in every State of the Union. The dependence of agriculture in the Southwestern States on cheap Mexican labor, largely of a migratory nature, is particularly disastrous from a racial point of view, since the maintenance of American civilization depends largely on the maintenance of a healthy and prosperous farm population.

_The figures represent distribution of Mexicans by states per 100000
of population in 1930_

Distribution of Mexicans by States. Except in the border States Mexicans are chiefly concentrated in large urban centers.]

Nearly all of the Mexicans who came to the United States were seeking to better themselves economically and to avoid the murder and plunder that had been going on in their country for a score of years under the guise of revolution. Most of them intended to return home as soon as conditions became more satisfactory, but as conditions from year to year failed to improve, the Mexican population tended to become a permanent one. At the same time few of the Mexicans became American citizens, and in every community where they settled in racial groups there were unsatisfactory standards of education and sanitation.

Most of the Mexicans come with their families, thereby differing markedly from some of the other foreign groups, as the Bulgarians, Greeks, Spanish, and Filipinos, which consist mainly of unmarried men. These latter either return home after making money, or else intermarry with the other immigrant groups. The Mexican community, on the other hand, perpetuates itself and increases without much intermarriage with the other population.

Since the depression beginning in 1929 there has been a repatriation of a portion of the Mexican immigration of unknown size but undoubtedly considerable. Lack of work has led many to go home where they can live more economically and be among friends, and at the same time American authorities began to offer free transportation back to Mexico for those dependent on public charity, and willing to leave. Thus trainload after trainload returned, and at the same time a tightening of the immigration restrictions and procedures on the border cut down the flow of immigrants to almost nothing.

While the census of 1930 counted nearly a million and a half Mexicans in the United States, it is probable that the number has since then diminished, and it is of highest importance that it should not be allowed to increase. The Mexican Indian has no racial qualities to contribute to the United States population that are now needed, and if he has any cultural contribution to make it will not be made by the immigration of hundreds of thousands of illiterate and destitute laborers.

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Guatemala. More than half of the population of Guatemala is still pure Indian, and the half breed class which plays such an important part in Mexico and other countries is relatively less conspicuous there. The inconsiderable white population is made up in part of the descendants of old Spanish families and in part from more recent immigrants, especially Germans.

The proportion of Teutonic names among the rulers of Guatemala during the last generation has been growing steadily. With two million population Guatemala is the most powerful of the Central American countries, but the Indians tend to be little more than a subject race exploited by others, and the general progress of the country is therefore in some ways slow.

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Honduras suffers partly from its tropical situation but still more from the mixture of races, and the large amount of Negro blood in the population of the lowlands. By contrast with Guatemala the Indian element is here unimportant, and the people are Negroes and half-breeds, or a little of each. With its 600,000 population largely of mongrel origin, the Republic has been a backward member of the Central American group throughout most of its history. British Honduras is an unimportant area with much the same characteristics. The so-called Caribs along the coast are now scarcely distinguishable from pure Negroes.

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Salvador. Smaller than the State of New Jersey, Salvador has an importance out of proportion to its size because of the dense population and large amount of cultivable land together with a smaller amount of Negro mixture than in the adjoining Republics. With a population estimated at a million and a half (such a thing as a real census is almost unknown in Latin American countries), its people are largely of mixed blood with the Indian predominating, but the number of pure-blooded Indians is not large compared with Guatemala.

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Nicaragua, a synonym for turbulence in the minds of Americans, has also a population of highly mixed character. The Indians did not remain a distinct group as in Guatemala, nor were they largely exterminated as in Costa Rica. They were absorbed into a half-breed population of more than 600,000 which has also in the lowlands a large Negro admixture.

The upper classes of more or less remote European ancestry have maintained a semi-feudal political dominance that has been disastrous to the welfare of the country, and it is doubtful whether the Yankee influence, which during the last generation has been stronger in Nicaragua than in any of the other Latin American states except Panama, has been particularly useful.

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Costa Rica has always prided itself on being the whitest of the Central American Republics, and its history of relative peace and prosperity reflects this fact. Apart from a fringe of Indians and Negroes in the lowlands, the population of nearly 500,000 is concentrated in a beautiful and healthful inland region. The Indians of the country having been driven out or destroyed at an early day, the settlers of Costa Rica were unable to live as parasites exploiting serfs as did the upper classes in some of the other Central American countries, but were forced to settle on the land and work out their own salvation. While they were therefore considered in colonial days to be in a pitiable situation, the result was highly advantageous in the long run, for it has given the country a more nearly genuine population of citizens prepared to contribute to the progress and welfare of the country.

A large part of the Spanish blood in Costa Rica is supposed to be Galician, and therefore to have a considerable Nordic infusion. The Gallegos, as natives of this part of the Iberian Peninsula are called, are one of the most law-abiding and hard-working of the numerous peoples that comprise the Spanish Republic, and their descendants in Costa Rica reflect credit on their origin. In most of the other Latin American countries the Spanish element is supposed to be largely from Andalusia and therefore quite different in make-up, with a noteworthy Moorish element.

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Panama with its hybrid population of half a million, largely Negro in composition, is unimportant in the picture of Latin America. North American influence has transformed it economically, but cannot change mongrels into a sound and vigorous stock.

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Colombia has large numbers of Negroes in the hot lowlands, but the bulk of the six million population is Indian with a slight infusion of European blood. The upper class of Colombia represents the results of geographical isolation, the region until recently having been inaccessible; and by virtue of a sort of intellectual inbreeding it has long been the most conservative and least touched by foreign influence of all the Latin American "aristocracies." The upper-class Colombian prides himself with reason on the purity of his Spanish blood, and still lives to a large degree in the memories of the ancient colonial period. In Bogotá there is an intense anti-Negro social sentiment. The isolation of the half-breeds in Colombia has come nearer to producing a new racial group than is to be found elsewhere in Latin America.

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Venezuela, in spite of its nearly three million inhabitants, is an unimportant country, largely hybrid with extensive Negro infiltrations. As in many other Latin American countries, the number of Whites is officially put down as about 10 per cent, but as in most such instances it is doubtful whether one resident in fifty can properly be called a white man, except by courtesy.

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Guiana. The three Guianas, British, French, and Dutch, represent one of the least attractive parts of South America in almost every way.

British Guiana has 300,000 inhabitants of whom one-third are Negroes, another third Orientals, mostly Hindu, and the remainder is largely made up of crosses between these two elements, of a few thousand native Indians, and of a handful of Whites.

Dutch Guiana has a population well under a hundred thousand, largely Orientals imported to furnish coolie labor and including Hindus, Javanese, and Chinese. There are many Negroes and a couple of thousand Whites.

French Guiana differs from the Dutch settlement mainly in being smaller, its population being not much more than 30,000, including many convicts or ex-convicts, for this has long been a French penal settlement.

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Brazil with a territory larger than the continental United States differs from its neighbors in many striking ways, apart from the fact that it was settled by Portuguese, not Spanish, and that its language and culture are therefore Portuguese rather than Spanish.

The Indian population was killed off or driven westward by the early settlers just as in the United States, so that it is now confined largely to the untracked and almost unpopulated forests of the Amazonian Basin, where perhaps a couple of a million aborigines may still exist.

To provide labor the Portuguese imported slaves from Africa, and then fused with them to produce the present-day pre-dominantly Negro population. The Portuguese here thus repeated the experience of the mother country. During the great years of Portuguese exploration and colonization in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, it has been estimated that a million Portuguese, mainly young men, went to the tropics, and for the most part never came back. Negroes were imported to take their places and to do the work of the country. Intermarriage of these Negroes with the old population left Portugal with a larger amount of Negro blood than any other European country, and greatly impaired its ability to contribute to the progress of civilization. Thus Portugal, which, when dominated by the Nordics, had set an extraordinary example of progress in many ways, now contributes relatively little to such progress and only the rebirth of a reasonable pride of race, and the application of a sound eugenics program will enable it to regain a position of leadership.

History has repeated itself in Brazil. The salvation of Brazil has been the arrival during the past century of European immigrants. Thousands of Germans poured into the Highlands of the Southern States where large regions have an almost Teutonic civilization at the present time. If a false interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine had not helped to interfere with this process, the results for South America might have been most beneficial.

But the main currents of immigration have been from Latin countries of the Old World. During the past century Brazil has received more than four million foreigners, of whom a million and a half were Italians, a million and a quarter Portuguese, and half a million Spanish. Thus more than three-fourths of the immigration has been from the Latin countries, and only about a quarter of a million from Germany and Austria. Since the World War this overwhelming migration from the Latin countries has slowed down. The German migration has, on the contrary, increased.

Brazil thus consists of two distinct areas: a relatively small, fertile, and healthful highland region in the south, where the main activities of the country are carried on largely under the influence of Mediterranean and Alpine immigrants; and a huge tropical area given over mainly to the Negro and Mulatto element and the Indians.

With a population of somewhere around 30,000,000 Brazil is not only the largest of the South American republics, but nearly as large as all the rest of them put together.

The future of Brazil depends largely on the nature of its immigration policy during the next generation or two and on the acceptance of a workable program of eugenics. Fortunately, no South American country has taken up such a policy with more interest than has this great republic. It still possesses an aristocracy which has maintained its racial purity, but this is probably too small a nucleus alone to regenerate the whole body politic.

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Uruguay. Crossing the boundary from Brazil to Uruguay, one sees a new picture. Uruguay is almost entirely white. Indeed, this whole region of La Plata is one of the future dominant areas of the New World. It contains less Negro blood than does, relatively, the United States. Not only have Negroes been largely kept out, but the remnants of Indian tribes have become inconspicuous, as on the plains of the Mississippi Valley, where the Indians, mere nomads with a negligible culture, were driven back by the march of civilization. The striking parallel between the settlement of this region and that of the Western States of North America is often pointed out. Each was a sheep and cattle country, and then farmers took up land and developed it into a region of prosperity and great potentialities.

Uruguay has a cosmopolitan population almost wholly of European origin. Since the World War it has attracted not only a large part of the Spanish emigration but also large numbers of Italians, French, Germans, and others. The earlier immigration was largely of North Italians, mainly of Alpine blood with slight Nordic infusion. The total population of the country is now well over a million and a half.

A wise selection of immigration from now on will still further increase the influence of this small republic, and set a good example for all of South America.

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Argentina represents one of the striking examples of a nation built up rapidly by foreign immigration. Nearly 85 per cent of its people are foreign-born or the descendants of recent immigration, with Italians forming by far the largest group. Moreover, the Argentine Republic has attracted the vigorous population of North Italy, which racially is mainly Alpine but still has a Nordic element, and forms a striking contrast to the population of South Italian and Sicilian immigrants that have filled up the slums of North American cities. The North Italians are more akin to the Swiss and the South Germans than they are to the South Italians.

Non-whites do not amount to 5 per cent of the population. The total population of something like 10,000,000 makes the Argentine Republic second only to Brazil in size in South America, and in every respect, except size, it easily takes first rank.

The racial composition of this extraordinary nation with its ultra-modern civilization, and its get-rich-quick atmosphere, deserves more extended treatment than can be given here. The English, though not the most numerous, have taken the first place in its financial world. French immigrants, though fewer in number, have become a very important factor in the progress of its civilization. A hundred thousand Germans have settled in the country and form the backbone of many regions.

Since the war Argentina has been one of the principal destinations of citizens of the former Central Empires who were going overseas. The spirit of the civilization has attracted many Jews. More than 160,000 immigrants during the last two generations are credited to Russia, and almost an equal number to Turkey. These last, however, were Turks only by force and were actually Christian Syrians from the Lebanon who became so completely identified with the retail trade of the country that the colloquial name for a small grocery store is "Turco."

All of these elements together do not begin to measure in importance with the Spanish and Italian elements. But in recent years new currents have set in which, if continued, will profoundly modify the character of the country by introducing a large number of Slavs, particularly Poles, Yugoslavs, Czechoslovaks, and Lithuanians, together with the Slavic element among the Germans. Before the World War the immigration to Argentina was about seven-eighths from the Latin countries, but since then these have furnished only about two-thirds.

Argentina therefore represents a white population largely Alpine and Mediterranean with a considerable Nordic element. It is doubtful whether it stands to gain by allowing Alpines to increase, particularly if this brings in different types of culture and traditions. Argentina might well profit by the mistakes of the United States and immediately orient its immigration policy along sound logical and constructive lines.

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Chile, unlike the Indo-Spanish countries just south of the United States, is also a white man's country. The pure Indians are a vanishing minority. The Spanish and dominant element is largely made up of Basques, but there has been a substantial addition of British, whose influence is important in commerce and industry, and of Germans, who have dominated the army and education, and have been an important factor in agriculture. Chile, with four million population, is therefore the least Latin of any of the countries south of the United States. The progressiveness and prosperity of the region have long attracted the attention of every traveller.

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Bolivia is another of the pre-dominantly Indian countries which have made little contribution to the world. The number of Whites here is negligible. Immigration has never been important and the Bolivian has developed a provincial arrogance and hostility to foreigners which is as prejudicial to his own interests as it is unwarranted. Scarcely one-fifth of the people even speak Spanish in their daily life, and two-thirds are primitive Indians, the others being hybrids of varying degrees.

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Paraguay is an Indian republic which has not only avoided the Negro influence common elsewhere but has almost escaped the infusion of white blood. There are scarcely any pure Whites. The Guarani Indians of this region were not highly civilized like the Mayas and Incas, and therefore took on a Spanish culture instead of retaining one of their own. It would have been extremely interesting to see what an Indian republic could amount to in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Unfortunately the course of experiment was obstructed by one of the most sanguinary wars in history (1864-69) in which Paraguay carried on a contest with Brazil and Argentina until the greater part of its male population was destroyed. At the beginning of the war, the population of Paraguay was officially said to be 1,337,437. Even if this were extraordinarily inaccurate and exaggerated, the figures afterward were no less so, for the calculation after the close of hostilities credited the country with a loss of more than a million. More exactly, the population was returned as 221,709, of which 86,079 were children, 106,254 women, and only 28,746 men. Nothing like this situation has ever before been recorded in a large population. Whole regiments had been made up of boys under sixteen. In more than half a century since then, the country has not begun to recover. Even now its population is less than a million. Immigrants from Europe have always avoided it. Paraguay is in a class by itself.

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Peru's four or five million inhabitants are mostly pure Indians, while the remainder are nearly all hybrids. Chinese and Japanese as well as Negroes have contributed to the mongrelization of the mass, and not one in ten even claims to be white, which here, as elsewhere in Latin America, by no means guarantees anything more than a homoeopathic dose of European blood.

The aboriginal civilization is often described as remarkably high but seems to have been the work of peoples who antedated the Spanish by a long period; and the Conquerors themselves apparently considered the Peruvian Indians to be less intelligent than those they had encountered in Mexico. The number of Indians decreased during the early Spanish regime until some districts were almost depopulated and the loss of leaders especially was irreparable. Whether or not the present inhabitants are the descendants of the Incas, they have not been able to develop a strong and progressive state.

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Ecuador is an isolated and unimportant region inhabited largely by backward Indian tribes. Probably not less than two-thirds of the 2,000,000 population are pure Indian. The handful of Whites and the few hundred thousand hybrids rule the country. The Negro element, never large, is gradually being absorbed and is leaving its stamp on the whole population.

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The West Indies are more important to the United States immigration policy than would be expected from their size, because of their close proximity to American ports of entry.

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Cuba has always received its immigrants pre-dominantly from Spain, and the imported Negro element, numbering about 800,000 of its three millions of population, is not increasing in importance. The island is considered less white than Puerto Rico, but more than a quarter of a million of the inhabitants are Spanish-born, these comprising nearly three-quarters of all the foreigners.

As in many other Latin-American countries, the Chinese have taken a strong hold, beginning nearly a century ago, and are intermarrying with the Whites.

Cuba does not represent a desirable or needed source of immigration to the United States, and should be put under a proper quota.

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Puerto Rico has a population of nearly a million and a half. The fact that this dense population cannot make a living under the present and backward conditions on the island, and that it is continually exercising its right of entry to the United States, is one of the most serious features of the present immigration policy.

The Negro and Mulatto element makes up a majority of the population but is relatively losing ground--partly from high death rates and partly by absorption in the mass. The Indian stock is extinct. Immigration from abroad has been negligible for a long time.

As the island is a territory, the inhabitants are citizens of the United States and cannot be prevented from coming freely into the mainland. The number of Puerto Ricans in New York City was at one time estimated as high as 100,000. If economic conditions are attractive there is nothing to prevent half a million of them from migrating to the continent and adding their traits to the much-overloaded "melting pot."

It is now clear that the United States made a great mistake, after the war with Spain, in taking over territories that were already populated by aliens. Previously the territory that was acquired was largely empty and suitable for settlement by the old stock. What has been done is not easy to undo, but it may at least serve as an emphatic lesson against any further acquisitions of inhabited territory in the future. Meanwhile there is an embryonic movement for independence in Puerto Rico, which may have to, indeed should, be encouraged in order to give the United States protection from its own folly.

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The Virgin Islands, which the United States bought from Denmark in 1917, have, like other West Indian islands, a population almost exclusively Negro or Mulatto.

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The British West Indies are overwhelmingly black, though many of them, such as New Providence, Barbados, Bermuda, and the Bahamas, have substantial English aristocracies that guard jealously their racial heritage. These British islands, particularly Jamaica and Barbados (the latter one of the most densely populated spots in the whole world) have been fertile sources of black emigration to other islands and to the mainland.

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Haiti is a purely Negro Republic, and offers a good illustration of what the Negro accomplishes if left to himself, even though given all the advantages of easy access to European civilization. The republic of Santo Domingo occupies the other part of the same island; its hybrid population has more Spanish and less Negro blood but it is not by any means civilized.

In general the islands of the West Indies now contain nearly 8,000,000 people, the descendants of Negro slaves with a very small but undiscoverable admixture of Indian blood and a somewhat larger but still unimportant admixture of European stock. They present a standing menace to the United States immigration policy, and afford one of the principal arguments for extending stringent restrictions to the Western Hemisphere. The whole Caribbean is in the process of becoming a Negro territory. Such a result may be inevitable, but adjacent nations which desire to remain white must protect themselves while there is time.

In broad outline, the picture of Latin-America is the picture of a diversified region occupied by some 80,000,000 people, mainly Indians, but with varying proportions of White and Negro blood, the former usually small in amount, the latter often large. The few countries that may properly be called white are not emigrant-exporting countries, and their inhabitants are for the most part non-Nordic, therefore not particularly well adapted to incorporation in the United States.

In conclusion, it may be remarked at this point that each successive revolution in Latin America has tended toward hastening the elimination of European blood and influence. It is usually the half-breeds who revolt and they, in turn, are subject to the increasing self-assertion of the pure native.