in civilized society; and recent developments ought to awaken the country to the fact that these affairs are of considerable moment to the success of our great experiment. No one questions that ability to read and write our own language constitutes a qualification for American citizenship, but this is a qualification that can be acquired after arrival. It is, however, a much easier and a much less expensive task to impart that ability to those who are already familiar with another written language than to begin at the beginning. The difference of cost in dollars and cents between the task of teaching the English language to tens of thousands of immigrants who know nothing of written language and that of teaching the same language to similar numbers of those who do, and the difference in the success of the undertaking in the two cases, are enough to count for something in making our choice between the two classes of immigrants.

But the ability to read and write constitutes a qualification for assimilation in a much larger sense than this. The revelations of disorder in our mining regions, of anarchy in some of our manufacturing cities, of uncivilized conditions in constructive camps, and of degradation in city slums and in those rural districts which the immigration population has inundated, have led several states to appoint commissions to study the conditions of the immigrant population and the methods being employed to introduce them to American institutions. That there is need of some more intelligent and adequate method of making these people understand us and our ways and our disposition towards them, and of making us understand them and their disposition toward ourselves and our institutions and laws, is the invariable report of such commissions and the universal verdict of those who have given attention to the question. We were going on our way rejoicing, assuming that our free air was transforming fugitives from all the nations of the earth into full grown Americans, when we suddenly discovered that there were in our midst destructive forces threatening to overthrow our institutions. Whole populations

from backward portions of the old world, bringing with them their own standards of living, their own social customs, their ingrained suspicions of government, have settled themselves like a swarm of flies upon communities unprepared to receive them. Unaccquainted with our institutions, trespassing in their ignorance, bewildered by the measures employed to guard against their tendencies, often misjudged, often exploited, unable to under

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