are replacing the Irish in the making of collars and cuffs; Poles and Italians are replacing the Irish and the English in the woolen, worsted, and cotton industries; Russians and Italians are replacing Germans in the manufacture of men's and children's clothing. And so it is in many other industries.

The new-comers drive out the native laborers not only because they are not controlled by the labor-unions, but because they are willing to live, or cannot in their ignorance and dire need refuse to live, in a way which the native will not endure. Mr. Warne, in his book entitled, The Immigrant Invasion, contrasts the standard of life of the English-speaking laborer in the anthracite coal-mining region with that of the Slav and Italian laborer. The English-speaking laborers of the period before 1880, he

says

wanted a home, with a wife and children and some degree of comfort. In that home he wanted none but his own immediate family or near relatives. For the rent of a neat, two-story frame house with a porch and yard he usually paid about four dollars a month. He wanted a carpet in the best room, pictures on the wall, and the home to be otherwise attractive and comfortable. . . . His wife he liked to see comfortably and fairly well dressed. For his children he had ambitions which required their attendance at the little red schoolhouse on the hill. . . . In brief, the standard of living

of the English-speaking races was a comparatively high one, which needed for its maintenance a comparatively high wage.

In striking contrast with all this is the mode of life which the Slav and Italian brought with them into the region. . . . They came in batches, shipped by the car-load to the coal-fields. When they arrived they seemed perfectly aimless. It was hard for them to make themselves understood. They would land at the depot, and . . . spend the first night on the platform, or in a stable on the hay. . . . Many were so poor that they came in old army suits, their belongings all in one big bundle. . . . These Slavs and Italians do not object to living in a one-room hut built by their own hands on the hillside, of driftwood gathered at spare moments from along the highway, and roofed with tin from discarded powder-cans. In not a few of their living-places the most conspicuous articles of furniture are bunks arranged in rows along the side of the wall. They are not particular with whom or how many they live, except that usually they want them to be of their own nationality. . . . Out of a wage averaging the year round about thirty dollars a month many of the Slavs and Italians easily save from fifteen to twenty dollars a month. The Slav with a family cannot save so much, but in not a few cases even with a wife and children his slightly higher cost of living is met by the wife taking in "boarders." The family income is also increased through the work of the wife. . . . She usually goes about barefooted and bareheaded even in the streets. . . . Besides all this, to these workers children are an asset instead of a liability.

Under such conditions as these, in which the immigrants are concentrated in little com

pact communities around great industrial plants like the anthracite coal-mines and the Bethlehem steel-works, or in the slums of our great cities, the Americanization of the foreigner becomes increasingly difficult. He does not learn the English language, because he does not need to; he does not associate with Americans, because they do not live in his community; he feels no high regard for America because he soon learns that it gives him neither the opportunities nor the rewards which Americans have. A great number of these people come to America not to become Americans, but to save a little of their desperately earned money in order to return to the Old World. The children of those who do remain very likely learn English-after a fashion; but they too often learn English as an American in Germany learns German, not as a language which he intends to make his own, but as an instrument which may prove temporarily useful. In organizing the army under the selective draft it was found that in many of these foreign communities from 60 to 80 per cent. of the draftees could not speak English, and in many companies it was necessary to teach the men the simple words and phrases of the drill-book before undertaking to train them in the elementary movements of military tactics. They went to war to fight

for American ideals, often enough vaguely wondering what they were, or sullenly inquiring what benefits they promised to the exploited poor.

Mr. H. G. Wells, who is at all events a keen observer, has this to say in his book on The Future of America:

At present, if we disregard sentiment, if we deny the alleged necessity of gross flattery whenever one writes of America for Americans, and state the bare facts of the case, they amount to this: That America, in the urgent process of individualistic industrial development, in the feverish haste to get through with the material possibilities, is importing a large portion of the peasantry of central and eastern Europe, and converting it into a practically illiterate industrial proletariat. In doing this it is doing something that, however different in spirit, differs from the slave trade in its earlier history only in the narrower gap between employer and laborer. In the "colored" population America has already ten million descendants of unassimilated and perhaps unassimilable labor immigrants. . . . And I have a foreboding that in the mixed flood of workers that pours into America by the million to-day, in the torrent of ignorance, against which that heroic being, the schoolmarm, battles at present all unaided by men, there is to be found the possibility of another dreadful separation of class and kind, a separation perhaps not so profound, but far more universal. One sees the possibility of a rich industrial and mercantile aristocracy of western European origin dominating a dark-haired, darker-eyed, uneducated proletariat from central and eastern Europe.

This is the danger as Mr. Wells sees it. There is, no doubt, much exaggeration in the picture, if it is to be taken as a picture of America as a whole. Mr. Wells, besides being given to over-emphasis, sees that part of America which travelers mostly see-the Eastern part more than the Western, the cities and industrial centers more than the rural and agricultural communities. But this is just what the immigrant sees also, and the America which the immigrant sees is the whole of America for him. Whatever we may think, for the great mass of the foreign-born population America no longer stands, as it once stood, for the ideal of liberty and equality. When the immigrant thinks of America he thinks of New York with its palaces on Fifth Avenue and the massed squalor of its East Side slums; or else he thinks of the untold millions which our public-spirited billionaires have accumulated by the aid of men working twelve hours a day for wages that would barely keep a slave in sleek condition. When they think of America they think of the bloated bourgeois Republic; and so their minds, seeking for the everlasting ideal of democracy, seeking for the "right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," turn to bolshevism and the class

war.

What Mr. Wells sees, and what the immi