156 NATIONAL ORIGINS PROVISION OF IMMIGRATION LAW 
Immigration, or more exactly, that cohering and aggressive mass alienage such 
as we have seen operating in other fields of the life of the Nation, is undoubt- 
edly playing a very important part in the malaise which to-day gravely troubles 
the body-soul of democracy. (Race or Nation, p. 133.) 
Without making any claim of superiority for the immigration 
chiefly discriminated against in the 1890 quotas, it presents as a 
whole no problem of assimilability. In the first place, these immi- 
grants speak the language of our country—a very important matter 
In connection with their fitting rapidly into our national life. They 
at once read our English language newspapers and know what is 
going on in all phases of American life and from the American point 
of view; whereas the immigrant who speaks a foreign language and 
sometimes does not master our language to the end of his life gets 
his ideas of our institutions and ideals only as interpreted by the 
foreign language press, which is often colored in its views, particu- 
larly on political subjects, by the point of view of the country in whose 
language it is written. 
For many reasons the newcomers from England or Scotland can 
hardly be said to require assimilation, as the word is used. They 
come from a country whose political institutions, particularly that 
of a truly representative government, are much like our own; and 
from a country from which we inherit our system of law, known as 
the common law, which prevails in every State of the Union, except 
Louisiana. Our Constitution, while it abolished the monarchical 
form of government, still prevailing in Great Britain, incorporated 
in its Bill of Rights many of the personal liberties won by the people 
of England in centuries of political struggle. They come from a 
country with which we have, to a large extent, a common literature 
and to whose great writers of the past we owe most of the master- 
pieces of our language. Further analogies might, of ‘course, be 
drawn between the institutions and civilization of the United States 
on the one hand and the Great Britain of to-day, such as similarity 
in forms of local government seen in the typical city, township, and 
county systems of the United States. Although we are to-day, par- 
ticularly since the Great War, greatly occupied with the American- 
ization of various alien groups, no one hears of any work of this 
kind being necessary ‘with respect to recent immigrants from Great 
Britain. In another respect, they assimilate readily. The census 
of 1920 shows that our British-born immigrants intermarry more 
with native-born Americans than with their own kind, there being 
more native-born children of mixed British and American marriages 
than native-born children both of whose parents are British. This 
is not true of any other foreign-stock group. 
I have offered (Exhibit 7) a table taken from the 1920 census, 
showing the figures on this particular matter with respect to several 
classes of immigration. 
Turning now to the question of the fairness of reliability of the 
national-origins quotas, as determined by the revised report of Feb- 
ruary 25, 1928, I wish briefly to refer to the action of the experts 
with respect to the only part of the statistical investigation which 
seems to have met with any substantial difficulty. At the time the 
preliminary report of the three secretaries was filed in January, 
1927, the claim was made that the previous conclusions of the Cen- 
sus Bureau as to the national origins of our population at the time