tenable, but the view recently advanced, that crosses are advantageous, seems equally hasty. W. E. Castle has cited the Pitcairn Islanders and the Boer-Hottentot mulattoes of South Africa as evidence that wide crosses are productive of no evil results. These cases may be admitted to show that such a hybrid race may be physically healthy, but in respect of mental traits they hardly do more than suggest the conclusion we advanced in our chapter on the Color Line,—that such miscegenation is an advantage to the inferior race and a disadvantage to the superior one.
On the whole, we believe wide racial crosses should be looked upon with suspicion by eugenists.
The colonizers of North America mostly belonged to the Nordic race.26 The earlier immigrants to the United States,—roughly, those who came here before the Civil War,—belonged mostly to the same stock, and therefore mixed with the early settlers without difficulty. The advantages of this immigration were offset by no impairment of racial homogeneity.
But the more recent immigration belongs mostly to other races, principally the Mediterranean and Alpine. Even if these immigrants were superior on the average to the older population, it is clear that their assimilation would not be an unmixed blessing, for the evil of crossbreeding would partly offset the advantage of the addition of valuable new traits. If, on the other hand, the average of the new immigration is inferior in quality, or in so far as it is inferior in quality, it is evident that it must represent biologically an almost unmixed evil; it not only brings in new undesirable traits, but injures the desirable ones already here.
E. A. Ross has attempted to predict some of the changes that will take place in the population of the United States, as a result of the immigration of the last