to the guests themselves. Left in new and strange circumstances to work out both their own welfare and their own conduct, they have been unable to do so in a manner satisfactory to us. It is small wonder that they have forgot ten or have ignored or have been impertinent to their hosts.

If immigrants are lawless, what is 'the law' in America and how are they to know it? The Romans had one law. We have not only a mass of Federal statutes, but innumerable statutes in forty-eight states and many thousands of ordinances, all providing penalties of fine or imprisonment for their violation, and branding the accused as a violator of law, if not a criminal. How make the immigrant see what many of our oldest Americans fail to grasp? Is it the law that an immigrant may dig trenches in one state but not in another; is it the law that an immigrant may shave his countryman in New York but not in Michigan; that he may own a dog in Delaware but not in Pennsylvania; that he may catch fish in Louisiana but not in Florida? Is it the law that he is entitled to hear and understand the accusation made against him by means of an interpreter in one court, and that in another the accusing officer or the complainant is the interpreter?

Only a few months ago a New Jersey justice of the peace fined an old Hungarian woman for having in her possession on Sunday seven apples taken from a neighboring orchard. Although the woman had taken the apples with permission, and although the person who had given the permission testified to it in court, the justice still maintained that carrying the apples on Sunday was against public policy - and persisted in the fine. It is only fair to add that local sentiment in this case does not seem inclined to tolerate the justice's decision. However, a for

eigner who could not speak English would, unaided, be helpless against such a decision.

Again, what is the immigrant to think when he commits larceny and the political leader gets him off if he promises to vote right at the next election? What is he to think when he is denied a license for a pushcart because he is an alien, but is advised to go on peddling and pay the fine each time he is caught, as his profits will cover the cost- with the proper influences? Wherever their own power and interests are at stake, it is the Americans who instruct him, not only to resent legal interference but to evade it.

It is true that our Puritan, Quaker, and Huguenot ancestors sacrificed temporal well-being for liberty of conscience and practiced the stern virtues of courage, fortitude, and a most splendid industry. But who shall say that courage and fortitude and industry are not still practiced when little immigrant children who go to school by day and have the free attention of doctors and dentists, sit in stuffy tenements at night making artificial flowers and picking nuts in order that they may have nourishment to carry them to these schools; or who work long hot days in canneries, taken out of these schools early in the spring and returning late in fall, so that they have but a limited portion of these blessings? Who shall say that these qualities are not practiced by the mother who has from three to ten children and ten boarders crowded into a shack, and must work eighteen hours a day for the three shifts of workmen required by our modern machinery? The machinery must be kept running and the human. feeders also must therefore be always there. Who shall say that these virtues are not practiced by our seasonal workers, made idle many months of the

year and subject to all the temptations, vices, and deterioration that go with periods of heavy overwork and of other periods of idleness? Who shall say that the laborer under the padrone, housed in shacks and stables, from whose pay are deducted charges for things he has never had, whose money given to agents for transmission abroad never reaches home, whose wages remain uncollectable, is lacking in these virtues, especially in fortitude?

And in how many schools in this country do the children have the care described by Miss Repplier? We reply, surely in New York City. But Barren Island, in New York City, has three hundred little children that have never had any form of this care. Barren Island is the scene of New York City's garbage disposal; the workers are immigrants, and nobody cares. Yet the value which the immigrant sets upon education may be judged by the following quotation from the Federal Commissioner of Education, in a recent report: "That these people are interested in the elementary education of their children or at least obedient to the school-attendance laws,' says Dr. Claxton, 'is shown by the fact that the least illiterate element of our population is the native-born children of foreignborn parents.'

When will the prevalent belief that the average immigrant has nothing but what we give him to commend himself to American civilization, be abolished by more careful knowledge of the immigrants? 'The immigrant frequently brings his contribution to enrich our civilization,' says an associate superintendent of the New York City public schools. "The things of the higher kind the spirituality, the reverence for authority, the love of art and music are valuable to soften the materialism that has accompanied our great advance in prosperity, and they should

not be crushed in our attempt to remake the immigrant.'

I am advancing no thesis that all immigrants have these qualities to contribute. I am saying that many of them have, and that the average American never dreams that they have. We shall never have a sound economic judgment on the whole big immigration question as a national policy until we have a sound and well-informed human judgment of the immigrant from the rank and file of the American people.

But the height of the failure of the older Americans is reached in their assumption that, as Miss Repplier puts it, 'Dirt is a valuable asset in the immigrant's hands. With its help he drives away decent neighbors, and brings property down to his level and his purse.' Americans who would never have run from an Indian, who would have conquered the forests and spanned the rivers, run from the Italian and the Pole. Alas! we too have deteriorated. We see nothing dramatic, we feel no challenge, in the fight to raise the standards of our less fortunate neighborhoods. The reason that the tenement fire-escapes are cluttered in Rivington Street and free on Fifth Avenue is not, as we fondly suppose, that immigrants prefer fire-escapes draped with bedding and pillows and children. The answer is that they move to Fifth Avenue as soon as their income permits.

Mr. Ross, whom Miss Repplier considers an authority worth following, in The Old World in the New points to a typical Western town of 26,000 inhabitants, 10,000 of them immigrants, and gives a picture of the vice, intemperance, bad housing, and wretched standards of living resulting in this town from the immigrant population. We in America believe in majority rule. There was a safe margin of 6000 Americans in that town, free to establish and

insist upon any standard they chose. Why were the Americans beaten in the struggle? Because here as in many other places they ignored or definitely isolated the immigrants, permitting them to work all day with Americans in the mills or factories where they were needed, and then encouraging or compelling them to spend all the rest of their time in their own corner of the town, in Little Italy or Hungary Hollow, and to encroach no more than necessary upon the respectable streets and schools and churches and recreations of the American section.

To many thousands of loyal Americans, the attitude of the GermanAmericans and especially of their children born here has been a source of wonder and of grief. But here, too, we find that we Americans have been derelict. Setting aside that part of the alienation of sympathy due to family ties and to the daily loss of friends and relatives in the war, how far has the rest of that alienation been influenced by America's own policy? We have had no policy. Have we insisted upon English as our common language? We have allowed the development of community after community in which English is rarely spoken. The proceedings of one of our largest cities are still published year after year in German as well as in English, at the expense of the city. Have we encouraged naturalization and made our oath of allegiance

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mean something definitely American? Not at all. We have encouraged and fostered the hold of German organizations, publications, and institutions. The German press is allowed to say what it likes in America, but not in Germany. It is true that 'we have no mutual understanding, no common denominator,' but the first Americans whose opportunity and heritage it was to produce these have failed ignominiously. It was not expected that our newly arrived aliens should have the responsibility for this,- else what purpose have our Revolution and our Civil War served?

It is difficult in the face of the sins of omission by the American and the sins of commission by the immigrant to fix the responsibility for our failure to-day to have evolved one nation out of the many peoples in this country. We shall probably, in the absence of that information which makes sound judgments, be fair if we place the blame on both sides equally. But regardless of this, I am convinced that we shall never have a strong nation until the strong people cease exploiting the weak; until the people intrenched in position, power, and prosperity assume the burden and responsibility of the welding of that nation; until the Americans define what they want that nation to be, and then set in motion every resource and agency to achieve this result intelligently.

You are to know about the journey hither from the beach. On Wednesday morning I left Batanga with two loads, and at Kribi I met Mameya and a man of the Mvele tribe with the Lehmans' jinrickshaw. The jinrickshaw is like a small dogcart, and under the hood of it I jogged along for four days, along a perfect highway between two painted forests; and all the old things were seen to have passed away. Mameya's little strong body trotted in the shafts; Nkot pushed behind; myself, I lounged on the seat and pondered with a kind of degenerate homesickness on the past.

Where were the seven deaths to be met in the old way? Where were the swamps under their fathoms of green, and the hills which one climbed on one's face, and the perilous river crossings? All the sense of sweet intimacy with the forest has gone with the trail, and out of the terrific tumult of the building of the road runs this immaculate

highway quiet in the sun. When I think of the uproar of the days and the outraged earth and the great cries of the falling trees and the enforced efforts of the forest tribes among the débris, I feel some lack of zest in the journey on the complacent highway. Yet it is a wonderful road and most creditable to those white men who camped along it. I suppose that they are well out of this by now, travailing in other forests and glad not to have to live 'on top of the paths' they have completed. I had a most comfortable journey, though Mameya did pull in at night to miserable towns, because he had relatives among the townspeople, I suppose, and I don't know the towns on top of this new road. But we did very well. I was happy with my hands between my knees all the idle day. I had a grass mat that I would spread out on the road or in a palaver house, and sitting on this I would drink hot tea out of my thermos bottle, and the carrier would give me a piece of smoking yam on a little pointed stick. I did not take my tent, but slept in little bark houses. Only the long divide of Pikiliki was familiar. There the river talks the very same palaver among the rocks and the forest drops peace upon the highway, and there I had to walk.

It is easy to talk about the path, but when I think about telling you about the people, I can't begin. So many Christians greeted me on the highway.

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It did n't use to be so at all. But now I can't make any sort of time on a journey, for friendly greetings, and for little gatherings of townspeople who call me to speak in the houses which they have built for God, little houses where they sit on logs and are immensely happy. I spoke in lots of such places, and lots of times I sat in my dogcart by the roadside and talked to the people. Once I was walking and in the shade of a tree I met a woman. She was a Christian, she told me, and held my hand and beamed upon me in a particular way they have. Presently she undid her head-covering, and out of the puffs of her hair she took a little coin-five pfennigs and this she gave me. I was astonished, at the money and at the spirit, but I tried to be polite and to know just how to accept her five pfennigs.

I was surprised, too, by the emotion with which my friends met me, trembling and with tears. At Lam, where a church has just been organized, Bian and Nshicko and old Mejio laughed and cried and held my hands. 'We see your face again. Ah, Missa Makingia, this long time that we have parted, always we have prayed that we might see your face again. And God is willing. Did you forget us? Did you remember us? Do you remember how you said to us thus and so?' They put me in Bian's little clean brown house, and there was to be no parting from me, they said, all that day. Still it was allowed that Makingia had to bathe.

We had meetings, one in the church and one in the palaver house in the evening, by the wood fires. Lam is a big centre now; five hundred come to the service of a Sunday. The church was organized perhaps a month ago, and it is curious to see how deeply mystical a sense of the fact of the Church in their midst the older Christians have. We gabbled a great deal all the

sunny afternoon, and after the night came in among the palm trees in the village street. We were beautifully happy. After we said good-night I heard Bian and Nshicko laughing together under the eaves of the house, and when I asked why, they said they rejoiced because of some 'arguments' I had made in the meeting.

I arrived at Lolodorf at the end of a golden day. Mrs. Lehman met me about an hour out, and a little later down the road came those of the schoolboys who knew me, capering with flags; and some of them are young men that were little boys, and those that are still little boys are younger brothers! It was sweet to see them and I was happy. Bitum was quite silly with pleasure. He was sure that my men were going to spill me out of the cart, and he shouted staccato directions as he ran in front of the jinrickshaw, where he had to be nimble or perish.

Lolodorf has changed almost beyond recognition. But the house is the same and the Lehmans are the same, and I could not sleep the first night for old familiar thoughts that came upon me in my old room.