keeping him out were devoted to the task of investing this spiritual wealth of his to the greatest advantage for all, the problem of immigration would cease to vex us, for we would all soon learn to hail his advent with gratitude.

North American Review. 195:513-25. April, 1912

American Ideals and Race Mixture. Percy Stickney Grant

The rapidity with which the democratic ideas are taken on by immigrants under the influence of our institutions is remarkable. I have personally had experiences with French-Canadians, Portuguese, Hebrews, and Italians. These races have certainly taken advantage of their opportunities among us in a fashion to promise well for their final effect upon this country. The French-Canadian has become a sufficiently good American to have given up his earlier programme of turning New England into a new France—that is, into a Catholic province or of returning to the Province of Quebec. He is seeing something better than a racial or religious ideal in the freedom of American citizenship; and on one or two occasions, when he had political power in two municipalities, he refrained from exercising it to the detriment of the pubic-school system. He has added a gracious manner and a new feeling for beauty to New England traits.

The Portuguese have taken up neglected or abandoned New England agricultural land and have turned it to productive and valuable use. Both the French-Canadian and the Portuguese have come to us by way of the New England textile mills.

The actual physical machinery of civilization-cotton-mills, woolen-mills, iron-mills, etc.—lock up a great deal of human energy physical and mental, just as one hundred years ago the farms did, from which later sprang most of the members of our dominant industrial class. A better organization of society, by which machinery would do still more and afford a freer play for mental and physical energy and organization, would find a response from classes that are now looked upon as not contributing to our American culture; would unlock the high potentialities in the laboring classes, now unguessed and unexpended.

The intellectual problems and the advanced thinking of the

Hebrew, his fondness for study, and his freedom on the whole from wasteful forms of dissipation, sport, and mental stagnation, constitute him a more fortunate acquisition for this country than are thousands of the descendants of colonial settlers. In short, we must reconstruct our idea of democracy-of American democracy. This done, we must construct a new picture of citizenship. If we do these things we shall welcome the rugged strength of the peasant or the subtle thought of the man of the Ghetto in our reconsidered American ideals. After all, what are these American ideals we boast so much about? Shall we say public schools, the ballot, freedom? The American stock use private schools when they can afford them; they too often leave town on election day; as for freedom, competent observers believe it is disappearing. The conservators and believers in American ideals seem to be our immigrants. To the Russian Jew, Abraham Lincoln is a god. If American ideals are such as pay honor to the intellectual and to the spiritual or foster human brotherhood or love culture and promote liberty, then they are safe with our new citizens who are eager for these things.

Not only do these races bring with them most desirable qualities, but they themselves are subjected to new enviroment and strongly influential conditions. Just here arise duties for the present masters of America. Ought they not to create an industrial, social, and educational environment of the most uplifting sort for our foreign-born citizens?

If working-people are obliged to live in unhealthful tenements situated in slums or marsh land, if the saloon is allowed to be their only social center, if they are fought by the rich in every effort to improve their condition, we may expect any misfortune to happen to them and also any fate to befall the state.

What improved milieu can do to improve the physique is easily seen on all sides. The increase in the height and weight of Americans in the last few decades is conspicuous. Even the size of American girls and boys has increased, and this increase in size is commonly attributed to the more comfortable conditions of life, to better food, and especially to the popularity of all forms of athletics, and the extension, as in the last twenty-five or thirty years, of the out-of-door and country life. If these factors have made so marked and visible a change in the physique of the children of native-born Americans, why may not the same conditions also contribute an improvement to the more recent immigrant stock?

Our question, then, as to the effect of race mixture is not the rather supercilious one: What are we admitting into America that may possibly injure American ideals? but, What are the old American races doing to perpetuate these ideals? And is not our future as a race, largely by our own fault, in the hands of the peasant races of Europe?

Indifference, prejudice, illiteracy, segregation of recent immigrants by parochial schools, by a native colonial press, bad physical and social environment, and the low American ideals of citizenship held by those the immigrant sees or hears most about, obstruct race assimilation; but all these can be changed. Yes, it is the keeping up of difference and class isolation that destroys and deteriorates. Fusion is a law of progress.

Every act of religious or civil tyranny, every economic wrong done to races in all the world, becomes the burden of the nation to which the oppressed flee for relief and opportunity. And the beauty of democracy is that it is a method by which these needs may freely express themselves and bring about what the oppressed have prayed for and have been denied. Let us be careful not to put America into the class of the oppressors. Let us rise to an eminence higher than that occupied by Washington or Lincoln, to a new Americanism which is not afraid of the blending in the western world of races seeking freedom. Our present problem is the greatest in our history. Not colonial independence, not federal unity, but racial amalgamation is the heroic problem of the present, with all it implies in purification and revision of old social, religious, and political ideals, with all it demands in new sympathy outside of blood and race, and in a willingness to forego old-time privileges.

Atlantic Monthly. 86: 535-48. October, 1900

Our Immigrants and Ourselves. Kate Halladay Claghorn

As a type of the southern Europeans that are coming among us the Italians may be taken, though of course, strictly speaking, no one race can represent another in all details. Those who 'know them familiarly as they are found in large cities-workers for the charities, the missions, and the settlements—say that they are a much misunderstood people. As a class, and when in normal family relations, they are gentle, industrious, frugal, and temperate; but they are looked upon by the public generally as a

lot of idle, dissipated cutthroats. On our records of crime they do not, it is true, make a good showing, but there is a special reason for that, as will be indicated presently, which removes a great part of the blame from them as a race. There is little pauperism among the Italians. It is a matter of every-day observation among charity agents that in the so-called "Italian quarters" in great cities most of the applicants for relief are Irish. The poorest Italian family manages in some way to make provision for a rainy day, and it is seldom indeed that it is found a habitual dependent on charity. The Italians, like the Jews, are eager for improvement, although not, perhaps, in so striking a degree. They have been reproached with denying advantages to their children for the sake of the money to be got by the children's labor, but a special investigation made some years ago by a committee of sociological specialists shows that this charge, when made a general one, is without foundation. The committee testified in the plainest terms to the fact that the Italian family, even in circumstances of the greatest destitution, showed a least the normal amount of interest in the education of their children, and in many cases made especial sacrifices to secure it.

So far as individual race traits are concerned, it would seem that there is no especial trouble to be apprehended from the mass of our newest immigrants. But beyond race traits we must look at certain general processes at work, as they are to be seen in the history of immigration as a whole, to understand the question more fully, and to judge more fairly as to the good or evil of immigration.

These processes may be depicted something in this fashion: We must regard our country as a land traversed by successive waves of population passing from east to west, each marking in its progress an ever advancing coast line, which, in the case of the first great wave, we have known as the frontier. The crest of such a wave is made up of the most mobile elements in a population, drawing after them, in due proportion of time and distance, the less and less mobile elements. First to get in motion in any normally developing community are the men, in an age period roughly to be defined as between early youth on the one hand and later middle life on the other, who proceed on their way unencumbered by wives and children, either having none, or leaving them behind. So there is to be found, or until

recently was to be found, on our frontier, as the crest of the first great wave of immigration,-the movement of the American branch of the Anglo-Saxon race to the Pacific,-a predominantly male population, young, active, unfettered by family ties, fired with energy, driven to the necessity of self-help, cast loose from all the bonds of society, from all law, religion, and morality as a long-established social body understands these things; on the eastern edge of the wave a population containing more women than men, a settled family life, quiet, order, and the sway of public opinion. On the western edge are poverty for the day, enriched by unlimited hopes of wealth on the morrow, a freedom that has not as yet developed into inequality, and a general simplicity of life; on the eastern edge, more wealth but less hope, more training but less versatility, greater inequality but greater possibilities through cooperation and control,-in short, the complexities of civilization instead of the simplicities of a primitive life.

The immigration of the fifties may be regarded as a second great wave, repeating the processes of the first, modified by the fact that it did not pour in on dry ground, like the first, but upon the heels of another. It, as well as the other, pushed before it a "frontier."

It may seem a little strange to call our great cities, with their crowds of people, their masses of buildings, their various paraphernalia of a modern civilization, in any sense a frontier. But such they are in certain vital respects for the immigrant, when he arrives on these shores. The movement across the sea to us is headed by the same class that led our own march across the plains, and, like the early frontiersman, the later immigrant, on arriving at the end of his journey, finds himself freed from the restraint of a public opinion that he has felt in the community where he was known. This may be as strictly the case in the crowded city as on the wide plains. Nowhere can one be more really alone than among strangers. The sudden relaxation of effort to keep up to a standard, moral or otherwise, when social boundaries are changed, is a familiar sensation to every one. And this is especially true when no great effort is made by the environing strangers to impress themselves and their opinions on the newcomers. To the immigrant, then, our people, with their thoughts and ideas, their social and governmental