stand and equally unable to make themselves understood, they are thrown back upon their old-world methods of self-preservation. Communities thus awake suddenly to find themselves powerless to enforce American standards. The residents who have given character to the community move out and leave the field to the element that exploits the ignorant. Mary Antin moves from Dover Street to Roxbury and is troubled that her new neighbor, helpless to meet the changing conditions, herself moves from Roxbury to some section a little farther up the line.

The marvelous stories of Riis and Steiner and Mary Antin and Rihbany, inspiring as they are, yet make it plain not only that we are treating masses of adult and illiterate immigrants with abominable cruelty because we have not the means of protecting them, but that by inviting their presence under such conditions we are giving free reign to a corrupt and corrupting element in our own population. Why these conditions? Because the immigrants coming in such masses have not understood us nor we them; because our institutions have been misinterpreted to them. Because, indeed, we have left the interpretation to those who chose to undertake the task, who had means of communicating with them that we had not, and that we disdain; and because the self-appointed interpreters have not themselves appreciated our democracy. In the next few years, there will be great endeavor upon the part of our states and municipalities to devise means for doing systematically and intelligently this work of interpretation. The day of haphazard policy is past. And when the task is seriously undertaken, it will be found that the problem is a vastly different and more difficult one in the case of peoples who can be reached by writing and print than in the case of those who can be reached only by word of mouth. Given two distinct masses of strangers to our ways and our purposes, one of which cannot be reached by printed matter, to the individuals of which mails do not carry, circular letters mean nothing, printed warnings, posted notices, directions, proclamations and laws, even street signs and inscriptions have no significance, and the other of which can be reached individually and collectively by writing or by print, and it must be evident to anyone that the two present to the nation in its attempt to assimilate them and to make them safe recruits to our social system two very different problems, one vastly more difficult than the other.

Some humorist has defined a pessimist as a person who being

offered the choice of two evils, takes both. Having thrust upon it these two difficult problems, shall the nation choose between them or shall it undertake them both? To choose the easier one and refuse the other would simplify the task. It would, at the same time, limit to a degree the already too rapid influx of immigration with its attendant evils of lowered standards of living and racial antagonisms. Even if we have resources to spare for solving just such problems, might we not better employ them with complete efficiency upon one of these two, and if there is any surplus, devote it to improving conditions in the benighted regions of our own land, instead of inviting other millions to come and be experimented upon while we continue to neglect our own?

The literacy test is not a sure test of character. It is not even a sure test of industrial efficiency, or of economic stability. But it does determine better than any other test yet proposed a certain qualification of the immigrant for socialization and Americanization in the mass. It does this without throwing the balance the wrong way as regards the moral, industrial, or economic factors. For whatever doubt there may be as to the inferiority in these particulars of the illiterate masses, no one has yet been heard to claim for them a superiority over the literate. The literacy test has, moreover, the great advantage of being readily applicable at the point of departure as well as at arrival, and of being equally applicable to all, independently of other considerations of condition or fortune or race or caste.

NEGATIVE DISCUSSION

North American Review. 199: 866-78. June, 1914

Crux of the Immigration Question. A. Piatt Andrew

It is easy to echo the cry of prejudice if you happen to be of Anglo-Saxon descent, and to assume an air of superiority and denounce the Italians, Greeks, Poles, Bohemians, and Russian Jews, as if they ranked somewhere between man and the beast, but were not yet wholly human. The same intolerant attitude of mind among the Anglo-Saxon Puritan settlers of early colonial days led to the whipping, imprisonment, banishment, and even hanging of Quakers and others of unlike religious beliefs. If you share these prejudices today, walk some Sunday afternoon through the galleries of the art-museums in our large cities and note who are the people most interested in their treasures; inquire at the public libraries who are their most appreciative patrons; visit the night schools and observe who constitute their most eager classes; study the lineage of the ranking students in our universities and you will find that our libraries, art-galleries, universities, and schools often find their best patrons among the offspring of these despised races of southern and eastern Europe.

There is no evidence that the newer immigrants are inferior to the old. It is only the recurrence of a groundless prejudice which makes some people feel so. But even if the new immigration is not inferior in character to the old, we have still to ask whether there is not a menace in the very numbers of the immigrants now coming in. We hear a great deal these days about the alarming increase in immigration. We are told that more than a million foreign-born are coming into this country every year, that the number is increasing as never before, and that the country cannot absorb so great an influx. What are the facts in this regard?

As to the amount of recent immigration, the tide ebbs and flows with the alternating advances and recessions of business, and the tendency is for each successive wave to reach a higher

level than its predecessors. In 1854 a record of 428,000 arrivals was established; then there was a great recession, and in 1873 a new high level of 460,000 was reached. The next wave culminated in 1882 with 789,coo, and in 1907 the highest of all immigrant records was reached, 1,285,000. During the last ten years the average number of immigrants arriving in this country has not fallen much short of a million per year, and this figure considered by itself does look portentious. One must bear in mind, however, that it represents only one side of the ledger and is subject to very heavy deductions. If you are reckoning the extent to which your property has increased during a given period, it does not suffice merely to count up the income. You must also deduct the outgo. And if you are reckoning the actual addition to our population which results from immigration, if you would have in mind the actual number of immigrants that we have had to absorb, you must take account of both sides of the ledger, of the outgo as well as of the income. During the last six years the number of departing aliens has been carefully collated, and it appears that from 400,000 to 700,000 aliens depart from the United States every year. This leaves a net balance of arriving aliens of only about 550,000 per year, or only about onehalf of the total that is commonly cited as representing the annual influx. Even this figure may look precarious, however, until we have considered it in its appropriate relations and comparisons.

The capacity of the country to assimilate the incoming thousands without any serious modification of our institutions or standards depends in part upon two conditions: first, upon the proportion which the aliens bear to the resident population by which they are to be absorbed, and, second, upon whether the country is already approaching the saturation point as regards the density of its population. Now the proportion of foreignborn in our total population has not varied much in recent decades,1 and even in the record year of 1907 the percentage of immigrants to population was lower than it has been on several other occasions during the past sixty years. As compared with the population of the country the immigration of recent years 1 PERCENTAGE OF FOREIGN-BORN IN TOTAL POPULATION

-Thirteenth Census of the United States. Abstract, page 80.