one used for living and sleeping, the other for the kitchen. Lack of privacy, inadequate toilet facilities, and overcrowding characterize the courts throughout.

Another serious factor revealed is the high rate of adult illiteracy. Of this group, 55 per cent of the men and 74 per cent of the women can not speak English; 67 per cent of the men and 84 per cent of the women can not read English, and 75 per cent of the men and 85 per cent of the women can not write English. Since these conditions obtain in 1,081 families studied, in which there are 2,073 adults, it would appear that there are more than 10,000 adult Mexicans whose literacy in English would tally with the above figures. It must be stated, however, that the coming generation, owing to the splendid work of the Los Angeles city schools, will read, write and speak English. At present 89 per cent of the children speak, 80 per cent read and 76 per cent write English. However, only a small percentage of the children are in the high schools, probably not more than 5 per cent being in actual attendance.

Sickness and disease reap a frightful toll among the poorer classes of Mexicans. A study of the Ann Street District in the heart of the Mexican section showed that while tuberculosis caused 17.4 per cent of the total deaths of the entire city, it caused 39.2 per cent of the deaths in that district during the same period. Poor and insufficient food, overcrowding and lack of ventilation, lack of facilities for cleanliness, ignorance of personal hygiene coupled with low wages have contributed largely to the tuberculosis menace mentioned, and likewise have developed the high infant mortality rate prevailing among the Mexicans. The infant mortality rate is nearly three times as high among this people as in the city at large.

The result of bad housing, illiteracy, and disease is seen clearly in the records of the Los Angeles County Charities. The Mexican, representing but one-twentieth of the population, contributes nearly one-quarter of the poverty cases handled by the county. Sickness and disease were listed as the major causes in 67 per cent of the cases studied.

These conditions are again reflected in the juvenile delinquency records. Of the 1,379 juvenile delinquents reported by the County Probation Officer for the year 1919, 176 were Mexican. The Mexican children are contributing, therefore, 13 per cent of the juvenile delinquency of the city. In this connection, it is interesting to note that the percentage of crime among adult Mexicans, however, is but little higher than that of the city as a whole. Of the 50,025 arrests made in 1919, but 2,755 were Mexicans or 5.5 per cent of the total.

The wages received by the Mexicans have increased materially since the war, though there is real doubt as to whether the Mexican's condition has been greatly improved, since the increased earnings have been absorbed largely by the increased food costs and the exorbitant rents. Prior to the war, wages ran from $1.60 to $2.50 per day, the general average approximating $2.00.

At present the wage averages $3.45 per day. This wage is likely to maintain for some time, since there is a steady demand for Mexican labor. It is quite probable that the temporary rule rescinding the head tax and the literacy test of the Immigration Law will be revoked by the Secretary of Labor in the near future, thus automatically shutting out large bodies of Mexican workmen, and holding the demand for Mexican labor at its present level.

The foregoing conditions constitute the challenge flung at the organized religious forces of Los Angeles by the Mexican population. The churches are organizing to remove the intolerable housing conditions, the menace of adult illiteracy, the inroads of disease, and the abnormal poverty situation. Recognizing the close relation of wage scales to these conditions, the churches are likewise concerning themselves with this factor. They frankly face the fact that 80 per cent of the Mexicans have virtually refused to become American citizens, and have come to the conclusion that the anti-social conditions prevailing are a major cause of this refusal. The churches have accepted this challenge and at present are drafting a long time program, seeking the removal of all anti-social forces and the substitution therefor of forces making for more abundant living. The Protestant Churches have invested more than $350,000 in property, buildings and equipment to carry on religious and social work among the Mexicans. In addition $260,000 has been raised and will be spent on new buildings in the near future. While the Protestant membership is comparatively small, the institutions are actually serving a constituency of 3,000 families or a total population of between ten and fifteen thousand people. These churches are employing sixtythree social workers and direct the activities of several hundred volunteer workers. The Roman Catholic Church is likewise serving a large constituency through regular churches, and is rendering splendid service at Brownson House, a Catholic social settlement.

The Mexican territory has been allocated between the various Protestant denominations and duplication practically eliminated. The programs of these denominations are quite similar, calling for the erection of thoroughly

equipped community centers, in addition to houses of worship. The Methodist Episcopal Church will raise and spend in the neighborhood of $500,000 in Mexican work in Los Angeles within the next five years. One branch of this denomination's work is unique. It is known as the Goodwill Industries. Bags are placed in the homes of Los Angeles and vicinity, and cast-off clothing and supplies are collected. This material is taken to the industrial headquarters where it is renovated. Destitute Mexicans are employed in this work and receive wages running from one to several dollars a day. The goods are then sold in the industry stores at low prices. The plan thus affords relief to the unemployed and inefficient, and likewise supplies clothing to the people at prices far below the market prices. The income derived practically supports the work, which in addition includes classes in English, homemaking, hygiene and religious education. Furthermore, men and women are trained in certain trades, such as tailoring, shoemaking and carpentry in the actual work of remaking the supplies received.

To meet the housing situation, official representatives of the various denominations have drafted a program calling for the purchase of tracts of land and the erection of model dwellings to be sold to Mexicans on easy terms which will properly finance the project. They further urge that steps. be taken to secure the rigid enforcement of all housing laws, that the church support the request of the Los Angeles Housing Commission for additional inspectors, and that the churches develop an organization of volunteer housing inspectors to coöperate as deputies under the regular city inspectors.

It is further planned to support the home teacher movement in the public

schools, to continue all settlement classes in English and to develop a series of home charts to be used in teaching English and religious matters. It is felt this endeavor will contribute much toward the solution of the adult illiteracy problem. The churches also plan to support the request of the housing commission that it be given authority to inspect one-family dwellings. This is felt to be essential if the campaign against sickness and disease is to be successful. Several churches plan to employ district nurses, some are maintaining clinics and milk stations, and are generally agreed that a preventorium should be provided by the County to which children from tubercular homes may be sent when conditions make adequate prevention in the home impossible. In the matter of poor relief, the churches plan to coöperate fully with the County Charities to eliminate fraud and duplication, and in the direct attack upon poverty to inform the community through its pulpit and press that the largest contributing cause is sickness, the majority of which is preventable. Following

this, it is hoped a definite campaign to remove the causes of most of the sickness will be inaugurated. The churches are also considering definite recommendations in the matter of the support of families bereft of the bread winner. Of the applications for poor relief 29 per cent were traceable to this cause. It is believed that this ministry of constructive friendliness will break down the barrier between the American and the Mexican and that from this friendly relationship will develop a willingness on the part of the Mexican to become an American citizen.

With the constructive programs planned by the churches, the publicity such work will certainly give to the Mexican problems, the willingness on the part of the city through its schools, social agencies, public health and playground departments to serve the Mexican people, it is not too much to hope that the major menaces now surrounding the 30,000 Mexicans of Los Angeles may be largely removed and this group of residents from a neighboring republic be given the opportunity and the desire to attain more abundant living.

WITH the first rumble of the Ger

WITH

man guns in Belgium came the consciousness that the United States might be involved in the European struggle and that a new and stronger national consciousness must be created. We were aware that this country was confronted by a vast unassimilated mass of alien population whose national affiliations were uncertain, whose political ideals were unformed, whose social and economic life was unrelated to American standards and American needs.

To what extent this unassimilated mass constituted a real menace to American institutions in peace and to American safety in war no one knew and few cared. Ignorant and blind patriotism must have its enemies real or imaginary in order to sustain life. The more ignorant we are of the strength and cunning of the enemy, the more we can emotionalize the danger, the more we can develop strength on the wing of imagination. The Americanization movement was therefore born in fear. Now that the war is over it is dying of convulsions.

But while the hosts of Americanizers were demanding human sacrifice and were feeding upon the freedom and innocence of millions of foreign human beings, thousands of intelligent Americans were working with the foreign groups giving them of the

1 Author of: The Social Survey (1916), Americanization (1920), etc.—The EDITOR.

treasures of the traditions of this country and securing from them loyalty and self-sacrifice, as was evidenced by the hundreds of thousands of men who willingly went into the war, and the millions upon millions of dollars that these very elements contributed towards the financing of the war.

To one who knows the soul and spirit of the immigrant, who has passed through the painful experience of analyzing, sorting and accepting American life, the spectacle of the rabid and ignorant Americanizing efforts was disheartening. It did not represent America as the foreigner has pictured it in his dreams before landing upon these shores. It flavored more of Hungary where the magyarization of several millons of people was attempted by means not consistent with American tradition, or of Russia of the Tzarist days with the persecution of the Jew and the denationalization of the Poles. For these reasons the Americanization movement could not survive during normal times. It was a negative movement; one that demanded human sacrifice and which did not stop with the expressions of the mob, but dragged into the struggle some of the high officials of the United States Government. Should we be surprised or sorry that it is now denied by many of the spontaneous organizations of the war period and that it is allowed to pass away of auto-intoxication and will remain unmourned by its once staunch friends?

I am aware that some honest workers still maintain that there is room and need for some kind of a movement which, for want of a better name, might be called Americanization. I am even willing to admit that much can be done to create and maintain a strong national consciousness which was not extant during the war; but that the word Americanization has fallen into disrepute is generally admitted, and a new name is being sought to take the place of the discredited term of the war period.

Many social and political movements fail not because of their aims but because of their methods. The best intentioned efforts have often failed because they were conceived for selfish reasons and were pursued without regard to the human elements involved. A movement that is born in sympathy and not hate, understanding and not suspicion, patience and not haste, appreciation and not contempt will succeed and the future efforts towards the assimilation of the foreign elements in this country should recognize these facts.

Before developing any kind of program of Americanization, if the term is to be retained, it is well to determine what could be rightly included under this term and what the elements to be contended with are.

A foreigner is an individual who has been removed from his normal native environment with its customs, language, aspirations, folk ideals, racial and national loyalties, economic adjustment and legal control and placed in a new environment which he has neither the means nor the power to understand. It would be a remarkable mentality that would honestly accept American life unchallenged and it would be a dangerous and dishonest alien who would pretend to know and love this country without going through

a long and painful process of assimilation. During the war we were more willing to accept the pretense of Americanism than to accept the honest challenge of the unassimilated to prove the high qualities of American life as superior to the life of the home country. We accepted simulation as assimilation and forgot that the dictum in Rome to do as the Romans do is merely etiquette that belongs to the group of conventional lies that have no room in true assimilative effort.

Let us see what the foreigner had to give up in the process of assimilation:

Language. No one should sympathize more with the effort to accept a new language in place of the old than the American who has from time to time made an effort to learn a new language. Yet, during the war, laws were passed prohibiting the use of foreign languages in assemblies of foreign-born persons; foreign language papers were suppressed or watched as we would watch dangerous criminals; persons who spoke a foreign tongue were constantly suspected of disloyalty or un-Americanism. All this

was done in the face of the obvious fact that the laws and customs of this country can just as well be explained in French, Polish or Russian, and that in the case of the foreign groups their own language was the only medium. through which we could have reached them and through which education in American ways could be achieved.

I have often said that I would rather the immigrant would love America in German than hate America in English. To fear that the speaking of a foreign language is detrimental to loyalty is as absurd as to think the Swiss are not a united nation because French, German and Italian are spoken in Switzerland.

As I look back upon the environment in which I first saw the light of