is but temporary-concentrating men in seasonal employments in summer and forcing them to crowd the cities for the winter months; no system can be a good one which sends men away from cities with their advantages to communities or districts where they live like animals, with no opportunities for education, religion or culture; nor can it be a good one where men are segregated and families discouraged or where aliens concentrate in colonies and are cut off from Americanizing influences.

Under our immigration regulations and by contract with the Government, we have insisted that aliens at Ellis Island shall be rated and routed directly from the island and shall not be detained in New York to be exploited. We have also insisted that they shall be sent to their destinations by the most direct route. We still leave the second-cabin alien to the mercy of runners, boarding-house and other agents to be detained and exploited as long as they see fit. How can we possibly expect an alien to be law-abiding, property respecting and honest, when his first experiences in this country are robbery, overcharging, neglect and frequently instructions to evade the law?

We furnish the alien with no information whatever about our resources, conditions, laws, obligations, rights and duties, leaving that to his own countrymen or to business and political interests that crowd the foreign newspapers with exaggerations and misrepresentations, of which practices the Government itself is ignorant.

Is it unreasonable, or, more dreadful still, unconstitutional, to require that a part of our domestic policy shall be first the establishment of the principle and the necessary machinery for protecting newly arrived aliens on their way to their final destination?

Is it unreasonable to require that nation and state shall prepare, in languages which he can understand, information which will be of service to the alien? It may be contended that he will not read it, that the word of his friend counts for more. This is true at first. But it opens his mind, sets him thinking, gives him the feeling that the new country is interested in him as an individual, and later, when the need comes, he has more than one source from which to draw. Such information educates his own countrymen who assume to educate him and he is less in their power.

There are other matters which fall more particularly within

the province of the state, but upon which there has been little agreement and action. The alien workman is the poorest protected of all humanity in this country and is even worse off than the children. Two illustrations show this: In labor camps, the working and living conditions of men are the worst known in the country and the children are the most neglected. In home work, the women are the most exploited. Both industries depend largely upon aliens. We cannot build up a sound country until protection is afforded aliens in the industries which they largely constitute. Every progressive state now has a child-labor law as a part of its policy. No state has any kind of an alien labor law. Every progressive state should add regulation of conditions in labor camps, elimination of home work and the establishment of minimum wage schedules below which it is agreed no person can maintain a decent standard of living. Unless this is done the restrictionists will find ample arguments in our economic treatment of aliens to force a higher wage rate and standard of living by limiting the supply of alien labor.

No domestic policy would be complete without some educational program. Recognizing the limitations of the powers of the Federal Department of Education, there still appears to be no sound reason why it should not be interested in the education of aliens to the extent of studying the facilities now offered for both adults and children. The Federal Immigration Commission made a study of the children of immigrants in schools, but there exists no central organization to put whatever recommendations it may make into practice. The subjects of adult education in English and civics remain untouched by the commission and there are no data showing the progress or methods in use in various states which could be nationalized, as is our public school system. One of the illustrations of this anomaly is that the Bureau of Naturalization requires a knowledge of English and American institutions, but in no way provides any such instruction. It leaves this entirely to the politician or to the philanthropist, with the result that the examinations are a farce and the process of citizenship undignified and superficial.

It is conceivable that the time will come when a part of the immigration policy of the states will be the establishment of schools of citizenship and regular and graded courses in both English and civics not only to meet naturalization requirements, but to meet industrial requirements. There is no reason why

the work of the courts should not be dignified and simplified by the acceptance of certificates from such established schools under boards of education, attesting qualifications for the granting of the various papers, nor is there any reason why such schools should not provide instruction corresponding to the requirements for first, second and third papers. Furthermore, the tendency of legislation is to restrict many occupations to citizens, and trade instruction showing what occupations require citizenship as well as instruction in the requirement of such business would prove highly important to assimilation and to progress.

Night schools for teaching English in various districts with as many different systems as there are teachers; no system of compulsory attendance or truancy officers; miscellaneous lectures on citizenship-all coming at the end of the day, when men and women are fatigued, will not answer the need. It is also conceivable that employers may find the introduction of English classes during work hours not impossible as a means of obtaining greater efficiency and decreasing the cost of industrial accidents, so often due to ignorance of the English language in which orders are given. It is quite possible that state departments of education may take an interest in the working out of school methods and text-books to suit the needs of aliens and that state legislatures may see the necessity for an appropriation for schools in camps, and a fund to be applied to localities where numbers of alien families are suddenly placed at work temporarily on contracts. These emergency families not only test the resources of the local school, but impair its efficiency for American children in matters of grading, and so forth. Such a fund might well include transportation where it is necessary and take small children in such communities to school during the severe winter months. Increasing the library facilities for aliens, providing American history in the languages of immigrants—these are but illustrations of what must constitute a wise educational policy. As nation and states we can scarcely be said to have any educational policy whatever at the present time with reference to adult immigrants, and yet for the year ending June 30, 1910, there were admitted 868,310 persons between the ages of fourteen and forty-four, or 83 per cent of the total.

Studies and encouragement of education among alien adults on the part of the Federal Government will not interfere with municipal and state educational work among aliens. The great

need is that the Government representatives-federal and state -should get together and enumerate clearly the principles of a domestic policy and then set about patiently and courageously 'to work it out each state according to its needs, and as fast as it can enlighten its communities and bring the vision to Americans who now think assimilation to be entirely a process affecting the alien and that the labor asset is the only one which the alien brings.

Survey. 25: 527-9. January 7, 1911

Adjustment-not Restriction. Grace Abbott

The commission has recommended that the Division of Information and Distribution shall be developed; that steamship lines shall be required to improve steerage conditions; that the exploitation of the immigrant shall be reduced by better federal supervision of existing agencies and the enactment of more effective legislation by the states; and finally, that because of the character of the "new immigration," and because of the oversupply of the kind of labor it furnishes, immigration should be considerably restricted by means of a literacy test. Public attention will probably be focused on this last recommendation and it is necessary, therefore, to consider with some care the reasons on which it is based.

Regarding the character of our recent immigrants the report says that conviction for crime is not more common among them than among the native born; that they are not diseased and are rarely found among the victims of alcoholism; that pauperism is "relatively at a minimum" among them; that their homes are in "reasonably good or fair condition"; and that their children attend school in such large numbers as to indicate that the advantages of an education are appreciated by immigrant parents. But all of these facts are outweighed in the eyes of the commission because it believes that the "new immigrants" do not intend to remain here permanently; that they come only to take advantage of the higher wages paid for industrial labor in this country and expect to return in a few years. While admitting this is not true of them all, the report says it is sufficiently common to justify "referring to it as characteristic of them as a class." This is the usual argument advanced against the immi

grant of today and it has done service against those of every generation.

Admitting that it is true, it might be urged in the immigrant's defense that he has never been known to take back with him the railroads, canals, and subways he has built, or the great industries that have been developed through his labor. But, as a matter of fact, it cannot be shown that these new immigrants will not remain in this country. The commission finds that 40 per cent return to Europe and 30 per cent remain there. Moreover, among the 30 per cent who remain are many who have not acquired a competence, for among those who return, according to the report, are the victims of disease and industrial accidents, the aged, the temperamentally unfit, and the widows and children of immigrants who have died here.

What 30 per cent do is usually not regarded as indicating the motives of the whole group and if the 30 per cent is made up very largely of the unfortunate victims of American industrial life, is it reasonable to say that even 30 per cent intended when they came to remain only temporarily in the United States?

The reason for emigrating, the commission finds, is no longer a desire to escape "intolerable conditions," and the public is therefore warned not to consider the immigration movement from the "standpoint of sentiment," but to look upon it as, an "economic problem." When from among the many stories of Russian atrocities, that of the young Russian Jewish mother who saw her baby's eyes burned out and her husband killed in one of the "pogroms," and who is saving enough to bring over the remainder of her family to America so that they may know some years of peace, is contrasted with the very mild persecution suffered by those Puritan ancestors whose courage we have been taught to respect, it would seem that an entirely new standard of "intolerable conditions" has been adopted by the commission. As a matter of fact the causes of immigration today are not really different in principle from those in the seventeenth or in the nineteenth century.

The Letts, Lithuanians, Finns, Poles, and Russians who are coming from all parts of the Czar's dominions are fired with the same political idealism which the German revolutionists contributed to American life; the Jews from Russia and Roumania, the various racial groups that come from Turkey, and the Spanish Protestants are seeking a religious asylum, just as the