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goes to America; the unionized worker of the Rhineland is
disturbed by immigration from the lands east of the Elbe no less
than members of a Pennsylvania trade union. But that in the one
case the possibility exists of forbidding the emigration and
immigration, or at least of impeding it, while in the other case such
measures could be thought of by at most a few eccentrics born a
couple of centuries too late, is only to be attributed to the fact that,
besides damage to the interests of individuals in the case of
international migration, other interests also are damaged.
Emigrants who settle in previously uninhabited territories can
preserve and further cultivate their national character in the new
home also. Spatial separation can lead over time to the emigrants'
developing a new independent nationality. Such development of
independence was in any case easier in times when transport and
communication still had to struggle with great difficulties and
when the written transmission of the national culture was greatly
impeded by the slight diffusion of literacy. With the present-day
development of the means of transportation and communication,
with the relatively high degree of popular education and the wide
dissemination of the monuments of national literature, such
national splitting off and the formation of new national cultures is
far more difficult. The trend of the times works rather toward
convergence of the cultures of peoples living far apart, if not even
toward a blending of nations. The bond of common language and
culture that links England with its far-away dominions and with the
United States of America, which now will soon have been
politically independent for one and a half centuries, has become
not looser but closer. A people that today sends out colonists into
an uninhabited territory can count on the emigrants' keeping their
national character.
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Nation and State
If, however, the emigration is directed to already inhabited
territories, then various possibilities are conceivable. It may be
that the immigrants come in such masses or possess such
superiority through their physical, moral, or intellectual
constitution that they either entirely displace the original
inhabitants, as the Indians of the prairies were displaced by the
palefaces and were driven to destruction, or that they at least
achieve domination in their new home, as would perhaps have
been the case with the Chinese in the western states of the Union if
legislation had not restricted their immigration in time or as could
be the case in the future with the European immigrants into North
America and Australia. Things are different if immigration takes
place into a country whose inhabitants, because of their numbers
and their cultural and political organization, are superior to the
immigrants. Then it is the immigrants who sooner or later must
take on the nationality of the majority.33
The great discoveries had made the whole surface of the earth
known to Europeans since the end of the Middle Ages. Now all
traditional views about the inhabitability of the earth gradually had
to change; the New World, with its excellent conditions of
production, was bound to attract settlers from old and now
relatively overpopulated Europe. At first, of course, it was only
adventurers and political malcontents who moved far away to find
a new home. Reports of their successes then drew others after
them, at first only a few, then ever more and more, until finally in
the nineteenth century, after improvement of the means of ocean
transportation and the removal of limitations on freedom of
movement in Europe, millions went migrating.
Here is not the place to investigate how it happened that all
colonial land suitable for settlement by white Europeans was
33
The assimilation is furthered if the immigrants come not all at once but little by little, so that the
assimilation process among the early immigrants is already completed or at least already under way
when the newcomers arrive.
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Nation, State, and Economy
colonized by the English, Spanish, and Portuguese. Here it is
enough for us to recognize the outcome that the best parts of the
earth's surface inhabitable by whites thereby became English
national property and that, in addition, the Spaniards and
Portuguese in America, and scarcely also the Dutch in South
Africa and the French in Canada, came onto the scene. And this
outcome is extremely important. It made the Anglo-Saxons the
most numerous nation among the white civilized peoples. This,
coupled with the circumstance that the English possess the largest
merchant fleet in the world and that they administer the best
territories of the tropics as political rulers, had led to the fact that
the world today wears an English face. The English language and
English culture have impressed their stamp on our times.
For England this means above all that Englishmen who leave
the island of Great Britain because of its relative overpopulation
can almost always settle in territories where the English language
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