Excerpt from Democracy and Assimilation: The Blending of Immigrant Heritages in America In Europe the fierce fires of nationalistic strife had not been extinguished by the broadening economic interests of the various peoples during the latter part of the nineteenth and the early part of the twentieth centuries. They had only been dimmed, and the whole continent was ready to burst into flames again upon the slightest provocation by the imperialistic war-lords. The assassination of the throne-apparent of austria-hungary in Serajevo on June 28th, 1914, furnished a fit pretext. Once the struggle was on (whatever may have been its ultimate economic causes), it drew nourishment from the deep and hid den well-springs of an aroused nationalistic spirit. In literal truth, then, the world war soon became a war of nationalities. The immediate motivating force was either the self-centered, brutal aims of the European imperialists at national pre-eminence in world politics, or the consciousness of an outraged, mutilated group life, as was the case in Belgium, France, Serbia and Roumania, or a fierce resentment of age-long domina tion by master races, as for example, that of the suppressed nationalities of the austro-hungarian Mon archy. The greater the danger of annihilation, the stronger was the impulse to fight to the bitter end. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.