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The great mass of the population is composed of peasants and tribesmen, all densely ignorant. On the other hand, many thousands have been educated abroad, or have travelled after completing their education at home. They, or at least certain elements among them which had had the support of the masses, proved their capacity to assimilate Western civilization and ideals.
Forty-seven millions of these insects are needed to weigh a grain, and yet, with the sea-salt they absorb, the solid elements of water which they assimilate, these animalculae produce limestone, and this limestone forms enormous submarine erections, of which the hardness and solidity equal granite.
And here you have evidence of such a unity of plan among all the animals which have backbones, and which we technically call "Vertebrata". But there are multitudes of other animals, such as crabs, lobsters, spiders, and so on, which we term "Annulosa". In these I could not point out to you the parts that correspond with those of the Horse, the backbone, for instance, as they are constructed upon a very different principle, which is also common to all of them; that is to say, the Lobster, the Spider, and the Centipede, have a common plan running through their whole arrangement, in just the same way that the Horse, the Dog, and the Porpoise assimilate to each other.
Hence it follows that, by wishing to assimilate the administrative plan of these provinces to the one adopted in the sections of America, inconveniences are unceasingly met with, evidently arising out of this erroneous principle. Whatever may be asserted to the contrary, there is no medium.
Then, turning over a few more pages, he came at the end of the volume to a few passages collected by Monsieur de la Brière, among them these reflections on the Eucharist culled from a manuscript of the fifteenth century: "Not every man can assimilate this meat; some there be who eat it not, but swallow it down in haste.
Where there have been an un-American fear of immigration and feeling against the immigrant there has been all too little effort put forth to assimilate the foreign elements of our local population. But we are coming to see that to prepossess is better than to dispossess. Prevention is found to be a surer and cheaper solvent of our child problems than punishment.
Even as in the ornithological world different species of birds represent the feathered race, and though differing in many particulars and forming separate varieties, yet assimilate as a whole, so nations migrating to the spirit world form separate nationalities.
His worst enemy is the demagogue who flatters him with the delusion that all he needs for his elevation is freedom and certain privileges that were denied him in slavery. In all the Northern cities heroic efforts are made to assimilate the foreign population by education and instruction in Americanism.
At each one of these steps each child is permitted to have only what he can bear, understand, and assimilate, while at the same time it serves as a ladder to the next higher step of development and culture.
This attitude of the Indian toward European standards of civilization; his indifference to material possessions; his unwillingness to part with the land; and his refusal to work, made it impossible to "assimilate" him, as other peoples were assimilated, into colonial society. The individual Indian would not demean himself by becoming a cog in the white man's machine.
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