You Gentiles
dates his protestations. And the more vehemently he urges his case, the more suspicious and uneasy you become. For he is urging as an accomplished fact that which is nothing but a hopeless personal aspiration. Your demand is not connected with behavior or with views: neither of these makes the American or the Englishman. It is a question of identity. You want us to be Anglo-Saxons, or Teutons, if you are to call us Englishmen or Germans. And we cannot be that—at best our great-grandchildren can be as nearly that as matters. But we cannot remarry our great-grandparents.
We cannot but exasperate you by such importunate assumptions. That strangers, aliens to your blood, should come to dwell in your midst, is one thing. That they should claim, after a sojourn of a generation or two, complete identity with you, is as absurd as it
is insolent. And even if they should dwell in your midst a thousand years, yet should keep apart, neither giving nor taking in marriage, they are not identical with you. In those
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