turn by Germans, Russians, Italians, Portuguese, Greeks, Syrians. Whole trades were deserted by one nation and conquered by another. The peoples of eastern Europe inundated the Pennsylvania mining districts, displacing Irish, English, and Welsh miners. The Irish street laborer disappeared; the Italian quietly took his shovel. Russian Jews revolutionized the clothing trade, driving out Germans as these had driven out native Americans. The old homes of displaced nations were inhabited by new peoples; the old peoples were shoved up or down, but, in any case, out. Cities, factories, neighborhoods changed with startling rapidity. Connecticut schools, once attended by descendants of the Pilgrims, became overfilled with dark-eyed Italian lads and tow-headed Slavs. Protestant churches were stranded in Catholic or Jewish neighborhoods. America changed rapidly, feverishly. That peculiar quiet restlessness of America, the calm fear with which we search with the tail of our eye to avoid swirling automobiles, the rush and recklessness of our life, were increased by the mild, law-abiding people who came to us from abroad.

There was a time when all these qualities were good, or at least had their good features. So long as we had elbow-room in the West, so long as we were young and growing, with a big continent to make our mistakes in, even recklessness was a virtue. But today America is no longer elastic, the road from bottom to top is not so short and not so unimpeded as it once was. We cannot any longer be sure that the immigrant will find his proper place in our eastern mills or on our western farms without injury to others-or to himself.

The time has passed when we exulted in the number of grownup men, bred at another country's expense, who came to work for us and fertilize our soils with their dead bones. The time has passed when we believed that mere numbers were all. Today, despite night schools, settlements, and a whole network of Americanizing agencies, we have teeming, polyglot slums and the clash of race with race in sweatshop and factory, mine and lumber-camp. We have a mixture of ideals, a confusion of standards, a conglomeration of clashing views of life. We, the

many-nationed nation of America, bring the Puritan tradition, a trifle anemic and thin, a little the worse for disuse. The immigrant brings a Babel of traditions, an all too plastic mind, a willingness to copy our virtues and vices, to imitate us for better or for worse. All of which hampers and delays the formation of a national consciousness.

From whatever point we view the new America, we cannot help seeing how intimately the changes have been bound up with our immigration, especially with that of recent years. The widening of the social gamut becomes more significant when we recall that with unrestricted immigration our poorest citizens are periodically recruited from the poor of the poorest countries of Europe. Our differences in education, while they have other causes, are sharply accentuated by our enormous development of university and high schools at the one end, and by the increasing illiteracy of our immigrants at the other. In cities where there are large immigrant populations we note the beginning of a change in our attitude toward the public schools, toward universal suffrage, toward many of the pious, if unrealized, national ideals of an earlier period.

Fundamentally, however, the essential fact about our present-day immigration is not that the immigrant has changed (though that fact is of great importance), but that the America to which the immigrant comes has changed fundamentally and permanently. And the essential fact about the immigrant's effect on American character is this, that the gift of the immigrant to the nation is not the qualities which he himself had at home, but the very qualities which Americans have always had. In other words, at a time when American industrial, political, and social conditions are changing, partly as a result of immigration itself, the immigrant hampers our psychological adjustment to such changes by giving scope and exercise to old national characteristics which should be obsolescent.

America today is in transition. We have moved rapidly from one industrial world to another, and this progress has been aided and stimulated by immigration. The psychological change, however, which should have kept pace with this indus

trial transition, has been slower and less complete. It has been retarded by the very rapidity of our immigration and by the tremendous educational tasks which that influx placed upon us. The immigrant is a challenge to our highest idealism, but the task of Americanizing the extra millions of newcomers has hindered progress in the task of democratizing America.

PATTERNS OF AMERICANISM

FRANKLIN: THE CITIZEN1

GEORGE WILLIAM ALGER

[George William Alger (1872- -) is a lawyer in New York City. In his own activities as a citizen he has taken great interest in labor and child labor matters. In this article, he has in an interesting way discussed Benjamin Franklin as a concrete example of Americanism.]

It is unfortunate for the fame of Franklin that most of us form our ideas of our great historical characters from school histories. We were introduced to him in our youth and under the worst of auspices. For in that part of the story of the Revolution where each daily lesson is full of exciting events, when the great embattled farmers are chasing Redcoats and killing Hessians, fighting thrilling battles and doing those interesting things which make the story of the Revolution a schoolboy's romance, the music seems to stop suddenly and the rapidly moving figures of our fighting fathers are swept ruthlessly from the stage and out shuffles an old man, with a broad, shrewd, and homely face, queer glasses, and a head surmounted by an atrocious fur hat-Benjamin Franklin.

How can a boy see anything heroic in an old man, no fighter, whose biography is in a footnote, which does not count in examination? An old man, moreover, whose footnote biography generally contains nothing exciting, or even interesting, except the story of his kite or the ridiculous figure he made with his three loaves of bread, one under each arm and one in his mouth on his first entry into Philadelphia.

Every American schoolboy, as he reads the history of his country, has born in him an essentially dramatic ambition1From the American Magazine, vol. vii, p. 318 (January, 1906).

the ambition that at some far-off day, in some far-off crisis of his country's existence, he, too, may add a thrilling page to some schoolboy's history, may do some deed of daring-like mad Anthony Wayne may carry some post by storm, die generously like Hale or De Kalb, may scourge the seas like Paul Jones. But what boy's ambition does the old man in the fur hat inspire? What schoolboy knows that it was really a great thing to finance the American Revolution?

It is precisely because he is the great American whom most of us failed to appreciate in our youth-not entirely through our fault-that in this month, which contains the second centennial of Franklin's birth, we should in our maturer years return to a study of one who was perhaps the first great American citizen and pay to his memory a belated tribute.

It is fortunate for Franklin that the second centenary of his birth falls as it does, for we are realizing, year by year, the supreme importance of the things he stood for, the supreme importance to a country whose future is to be won through the arts of peace and not of war, of his type of citizenship. We have suffered from the military ideal of citizenship, for it made and makes the citizenship of peace seem dull, tame, and not worth while. The country has never lacked men who would die for it. Such danger as it is in today lies in its lack of men willing to do something for it while they are alive with their skins not in danger.

The newspapers and magazines are full of the crooked doings of men who are today undermining the foundations of a government for which, in times of war, they would carry a gun. Our supreme problem in these days, when so much is being said of corruption in office and the corrupting influences of businessmen on public life, the supreme problem is, how shall we make the ideal of citizenship, plain everyday citizenship-seem something highly important and worth striving for? The lesson which we can learn from the career of Franklin is the tremendous, permanent value of this type of citizenship.

In point of time he was the first great American citizen. He was widely and favorably known and nearing the middle of