color of their environment; for different reasons, but as surely, people do the same. Unfortunately, from the nature of the case the immigrant generally begins at the bottom. His helplessness makes him sought for as prey by sharpers and grafters; it is all that the immigration officials can do to keep them off as he lands. As soon as he leaves the paternal care of Ellis Island they attack in force. Boarding-house runners, shady employment agents, sellers of shoddy wares, extortionate hack drivers and expressmen beset his way. One hears all sorts of stories of abuses from both Americans and Slavs of bosses who take bribes to give employment or to assign good chambers in the mine, of ill usage at the hands of those who should be officers of justice, of arrests for the sake of fees,1 of unjust fines, of excessive costs paid rather than incur a greater expense.

The suffering and loss are less serious bad as they are than the evil lesson. In school the boy who has been cruelly hazed is apt to be cruel to the next crop of victims, and in the same way fraud and harshness tend to reproduce themselves in the larger world.

But it is not only direct ill treatment that is a peril; the economic pressure and low standards of our lowest industrial strata are in themselves disastrous.

My people do not live in America, they live underneath America. America goes on over their heads. America does not begin till a man is a workingman, till he is earning two dollars a day. A laborer cannot afford to be an American."

These words, which were said to be by one of the wisest Slav leaders that I have ever met, have rung in my mind during all the five years since he spoke them.2 Beginning at the bottom, "living not in America but underneath America," means living

1 See Report of the Commission on Immigration of the State of New York, 1909, especially pp. 54-61. See also H. V. Blaxter, "The Aldermen and their Courts," Charities and the Commons, Vol. XXI (February 6, 1909), pp. 851-858, and Koukol, "The Slav's a Man for A' That," ibid., pp. 589-598.

2 Father Paul Tymkevich, a Ruthenian Greek Catholic priest of Yonkers. Had he been spared, he could have helped his countrymen and us. See "A Shepherd of Immigrants," for some account of his work. Charities, Vol. XIII (December, 1909), pp. 193-194.

among the worst surroundings that the country has to show, worse, often, than the public would tolerate, except that "only foreigners" are affected. Yet to foreigners they are doubly injurious because, coming as they often do, with low home standards, but susceptible, eager, and apt to take what they find as the American idea of what ought to be, they are likely to accept and adopt as "all right" whatever they tumble into.

The intoxication of the change from homes where there is no money to be made and no chance for any sort of advancement, to the boundless financial opportunities (or what appear such) of America, often results in a moral degeneration. Too often the educated immigrant has been imbued by what he has read before coming here with the idea that America is "the land of the almighty dollar," and arrives neither expecting nor desiring anything else of the country than the opportunity to get as rich as possible. It is a tragi-comedy to see at once the native American upbraiding the newcomer with having come here solely to make money (while he himself, very likely, is living in a town which he has chosen purely for the same reason, and which he makes no effort to serve), and the newcomer, making no move to get into touch with American strivings toward ideals, proclaiming to everyone that America is a country where no one cares for anything but material success.

What then ought we to be doing for these strangers in our midst? If we ought not to try to "Americanize" them, have we no obligations toward them at all?

It is obviously our plain duty to give the immigrant (and everyone else) fair treatment and honest government, and to maintain conditions making wholesome, decent living possible. This is the minimum required at our hands, not by the Golden Rule- that asks much more but by the most elementary ethic of civilization. Yet as a matter of fact, this simple, fundamental thing we cannot do. It is not in our power.

We can and must do what in the end will be a better thing. We must get our new neighbors to work with us for these things. If their isolation is not to continue, America must come to mean to them, not a rival nationality eager to make them forget their

past, and offering them material bribes to induce them to abandon their ideals. We must learn to connect our ideals and theirs, we must learn, as Miss Addams has demonstrated, to work together with them for justice, for humane conditions of living, for beauty and for true, not merely formal, liberty.

Clubs and classes, libraries and evening schools, settlements, and, above all, movements in which different classes of citizens join to bring about specific improvements in government or in living conditions, are of infinite value as they conduce to this higher unity, in which we may preserve every difference to which men cling with affection, without feeling ourselves any the less fellow citizens and comrades.

30. DEMOCRACY VERSUS THE MELTING POT A STUDY OF AMERICAN NATIONALITY1

In 1776 the mass of white men in the colonies were actually, with respect to one another, rather free and rather equal. I refer, not so much to the absence of great differences in wealth, as to the fact that the whites were like-minded. They were possessed of ethnic and cultural unity; they were homogeneous with respect to ancestry and ideals. Their century-and-a-half-old tradition as Americans was continuous with their immemorially older tradition as Britons. They did not, until the economic-political quarrel with the mother country arose, regard themselves as other than Englishmen, sharing England's dangers and England's glories. When the quarrel came they remembered how they had left the mother country in search of religious liberty for themselves; how they had left Holland, where they had found this liberty, for fear of losing their ethnic and cultural identity, and what hardships they had borne for the sake of conserving both the liberty and the identity. Upon these they grafted that political liberty the love of which was innate, perhaps, but the expression of which was occasioned by the economic warfare with the merchants of England. This grafting was not, of course, conscious. The

1 By Horace M. Kallen. Adapted from the Nation, February 18 and February 25, 1915, pp. 190-194, 217-220.

continuity established itself rather as a mood than as an articulate idea. The economic situation was only an occasion, and not a cause. The cause lay in the homogeneity of the people, their like-mindedness, and in their self-consciousness.

Now, it happens that the preservation and development of any given type of civilization rests upon these two conditions-likemindedness and self-consciousness. Without them art, literature -culture in any of its nobler forms is impossible: and colonial America had a culture-chiefly of New England - but representative enough of the whole British-American life of the period. Within the area of what we now call the United States this life was not, however, the only life. Similarly animated groups of Frenchmen and Germans, in Louisiana and in Pennsylvania, regarded themselves as the cultural peers of the British, and because of their own common ancestry, their like-mindedness and self-consciousness, they have retained a large measure of their individuality and spiritual autonomy to this day, after generations of unrestricted and mobile contact and a century of political union with the dominant British populations.

In the course of time the state, which began to be with the Declaration of Independence, became possessed of all the United States. French and Germans in Louisiana and Pennsylvania remained at home; but the descendants of the British colonists trekked across the continent, leaving tiny self-conscious nuclei of population in their wake, and so established ethnic and cultural standards for the whole country. Had the increase of these settlements borne the same proportion to the unit of population that it bore between 1810 and 1820, the Americans of British stock would have numbered to-day over 100,000,000. The inhabitants of the country do number over 100,000,000; but they are not the children of the colonists and pioneers: they are immigrants and the children of immigrants, and they are not British, but of all the other European stocks.

Now, of all these immigrant peoples the greater part are peasants, vastly illiterate, living their lives at fighting weight, with a minimum of food and a maximum of toil. Mr. Ross1 thinks

1 See E. A. Ross, The Old World in the New. The Century Co., 1914.

that their coming to America was determined by no spiritual urge; only the urge of steamship agencies and economic need or greed. However generally true this opinion may be, he ignores, curiously enough, three significant and one notable exception to it. The significant exceptions are the Poles, the Finns, the Bohemians -the subjugated Slavic nationalities generally. Political and religious and cultural persecution plays no small rôle in the movement of the masses of them. The notable exception is the Jews. The Jews come far more with the attitude of the earliest settlers than any of the other peoples; for they more than any other present-day immigrant group are in flight from persecution and disaster; in search of economic opportunity, liberty of conscience, civic rights. They have settled chiefly in the Northeast, with New York City as the center of greatest concentration. Among them, as among the Puritans, the Pennsylvania Germans, the French of Louisiana, self-consciousness and like-mindedness are intense and articulate. But they differ from the subjugated Slavic peoples in that the latter look backward and forward to actual, even if enslaved, homelands; the Jews, in the mass, have thus far looked to America as their homeland.

In sum, when we consider that portion of our population which has taken root, we see that it has not stippled the country in small units of diverse ethnic groups. It forms rather a series of stripes or layers of varying sizes, moving east to west along the central axis of settlement, where towns are thickest; i.e., from New York and Philadelphia, through Chicago and St. Louis, to San Francisco and Seattle. Stippling is absent even in the towns, where the variety of population is generally greater. Probably 90 per cent of that population is either foreign-born or of foreign stock; yet even so, the towns are aggregations, not units. Broadly divided into the sections inhabited by the rich and those inhabited by the poor, this economic division does not abolish, it only crosses, the ethnic one. There are rich and poor little Italys, Irelands, Hungarys, Germanys, and rich and poor Ghettos. The common city life, which depends upon like-mindedness, is not inward, corporate, and inevitable, but external, inarticulate, and incidental, a reaction to the need of amusement and the need of