Internal crises drove intellectuals from loose antiforeignism to racial fixity

Evidence

Three prominent intellectuals of the day illustrate this evolution in the Anglo-Saxon idea. Each of them embarked on antiforeign agitation in the loose terms provoked by the internal events of the eighties, and each of them ended by fixing on the new immigration as constitutionally incapable of assimilation. — John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 833