line, the employer interested only in his labor output, and he is treated accordingly. . . By the time the immigrant has shaken hands along these various reception lines he feels he knows everybody, and he has a very definite idea of liberty, justice, freedom, law, order, and measures of happiness, which in no sense accords with our forefathers' ideal of America." This same writer describes an industrial plant where immigrants are employed. "His men sleep five to fifteen in a room, often on the floor and in their clothing; they have no care and eat badly prepared food. They crowd family houses, destroying privacy and morality . . . One native-born American controls the health, decency, morality, and efficiency of some 8,000 immigrant workmen, whose only protest is to move on, and whose only future is high enough wages to return to their home country. And the worst of it is that men get used to these conditions, believing them to be American; and with this belief go the dreams, the visions, and the ambitions which are the essence of good citizenship. The prospective good citizen is sacrificed to the demand for cheap labor, which is a native-American demand." Conditions are, of course, by no means always so bad as this. But they are sometimes as bad, and they are seldom anywhere near what they ought to be. This is the crux of the problem of Americanization. These people are being fashioned not by what we preach to them, but by what we do to them. How can they believe in the sincerity of our professions of idealism when they find themselves exploited on every hand and unable to live a decent human life? Actions speak louder than words; and what they see is a scramble for profits, a race in which the clever and the aggressive and the fortunate push their way to a competence, while the timid and conscientious get pushed to the wall. They see honest and brave men deported or sent to prison for daring to voice opinions contrary to the accepted creed. They find themselves with little "effective liberty," little actual equality of opportunity; their democratic rights are apt to seem a mockery. Only efficiency seems a genuine American ideal-an efficiency in whose name they are treated as mere unthinking "hands." Often they are bitterly disillusioned in their dreams of America. No doubt they are often partly to blame. But the greater blame rests upon the rest of us, who allow them to be so bewildered and exploited and driven to a disillusionment so rapid and so harsh. The writer of a magazine article that has appeared since the above words were set down has so well expressed the root of the matter that some sentences of his are best appended: "You may give the alien evening schools and continuation schools; you may teach his wife in the home and his daughter in the factory; you may flood him with reprints of the Declaration of Independence and the speeches of Lincoln; and when you have finished, you will be no farther along the road of winning his heart and his co-operation than when you began. "What we have to do is, therefore, clear enough. It is not, as the now popular phrase has it, that we must Americanize the Americans. It is much more than that. Before the immigrant can be won over, we must Americanize America herself. We must lift American institutions and American practices to the L high plane of America's own traditions. We must come to look upon the immigrant as he is, a boon to us and an equal, instead of a nuisance and an uninvited invader. And we must somehow meet his ideal of us and our country by fashioning them in the mould of the ideals and the aspirations of the twentieth century. When we have done this much, life itself will take care of the future. For America is still very much in the making, and it will require the energy and the goodwill and the traditions of all the peoples of the earth, working together, to make her what she started out to be, a greater and a freer and a nobler Europe." SUGGESTED READINGS E. A. Steiner, Nationalizing America. Woodrow Wilson, Speech at Philadelphia, May 10, 1915. (Reprinted in Foerster and Pierson, op. cit., p. 178). U. S. Bureau of Education Bulletin: America, Americanism, Mahoney and Herlikey, First Steps in Americanization. R. L. Ashley, The New Civics. C. A. and M. R. Beard, American Citizenship. A. W. Dunn, The Citizen and the Community. Moley and Cook, Lessons in Democracy. W. H. Allen, Universal Training for Citizenship and Public Alissa Franc, Use Your Government. Gino Speranza, in Atlantic Monthly, vol. 125, p. 263. CHAPTER XXIX FAITH IN AMERICA THIS Volume has been concerned rather with criticism and warning than with eulogy and congratulation. We are far too prone to brag of our achievements and too little disposed to acknowledge our shortcomings. If the American spirit is to find its splendid fulfilment, it will be not through a complacent acquiescence in things as they are, but through our earnest efforts to overcome the obstacles that stand in the way and to embody that spirit more completely in legislation and practice. But the picture must not be drawn too dark. We have not yet fully realized our fathers' dreams, but, on the whole, we have done well. And the signs of the times are full of promise. There is more criticism of our institutions, more fault-finding, more clash of interpretation and program, than ever. But that is because more people are taking our historic ideals seriously, more people are interesting themselves in their realization. We perceive the difficulties more keenly, we realize the mistakes that have been made, we are not so blindly optimistic. But we have not lost faith. And precisely this spirit of criticism, this chorus of proposals, this growing soberness of reflection, warrants our faith and pledges its fulfilment. Already the relative success of our experiment in self-government has had an enormous effect upon the rest of the world. And more than ever we have the opportunity to play the rôle of spiritual as well as material leader. In the inspiring words of Roosevelt, "We are not only custodians of the hopes of our children, but in a peculiar sense we are custodians of the hope of the world." "Our nation is that one among all the nations of the earth which holds in its hands the fate of the coming years. We enjoy exceptional advantages, and are menaced by exceptional dangers; and all signs indicate that we shall either fail greatly or succeed greatly. I firmly believe that we shall succeed; but we must not be foolishly blind to the dangers by which we are threatened, for that is the way to fail.” Not only will our future have an influence far beyond our geographical frontiers, but millions more, scores of millions, are coming to these shores, to join their fortunes with ours. What they are to become rests very largely with us of the older American stock. By the middle of this century we shall doubtless have a population of more than a hundred and fifty million, by its close probably two hundred million. And this within the lifetime of people now living! What a challenge to our idealism! We are a very young nation, not yet a hundred and fifty years old-a mere moment in the history of man. Infinite vistas stretch before us. Why should not our nation endure for thousands of centuries? Surely there could be no object more worthy of our effort and sacrifice than to help shape the polity and guide the development of this youthful giant among the nations. Kings and Kaisers have fallen; the battle against political autocracy, of the sort that has so long plagued the earth, seems won. But the democracies are still far from safe. They will not be safe from |