Too many are but little touched, or touched only in painful ways by the Americanizing process, especially the married women who stay in their homes. Their lot is so often a tragedy. They have lost their own country and yet have not gained another. Even this is not the worst. The younger folks are in some fashion made over into American men and women. And here comes in the crucial question which concerns something more than universality of opportunity, quality of opportunity. These little Poles and Ruthenians and Bohemians are finally made over into Americans. Their life-contribution will be given to the generation now growing up, of which they will form a part. We want that contribution to be as fine as possible. They cannot give more than they themselves are. And what they are to be in very large part we are making them. Will they not be all the finer citizens-to-be if we come closer to them and to their parents in the warm friendly social relations of life?
The plane of social intercourse is the last to be transformed by democracy. Here is it that aristocratic and undemocratic limitations hamper us the longest. Here we are still far behind the fine, free and admirable planing out of differences, and rounding off of angles and making over of characters that is part of the democracy of the street and the marketplace. Here between strangers is the closest physical nearness. Here the common need to live and earn a living supplies a mutual education through the very acts of serving and being served, of buying and selling and using the common thoroughfares and means of transportation. And that basic democracy of the street and the marketplace is all between strangers.
It is the very fact that this blending of peoples, this rubbing off of racial angles, takes place in and through the commonplace surroundings of everyday life, that blinds most to the greatness and the wonder of the transformation and to the pressing importance of the right adjustments being made, and made early. But to the observer whose eyes are not holden, there comes a sense that he is every day witnessing a warfare of Titans, that in these prosaic American communities it is world powers that are in clash and in conflict while in preparation for the harmony to be.
Upon careful consideration it would appear that the immigrant problem is only a slightly varied expression of the general social and economic problem. It focuses public attention because the case of the immigrant is so extreme. For instance, whatever conditions, industrial or civic, press hardly upon the American worker, these conditions press with yet greater hardship upon the alien. The alien and his difficulties form therefore a first point of contact, the point where the social reformer begins with his suggestions for improvement. The very same thought unconsciously forms the basis of many of the proposed methods of dealing with the immigrant, however startlingly these may differ from one another in expression. On the one hand we have such suggestions as that of Mr. Paul Kellogg, which he called "A Labor Tariff, A Minimum Wage for the Immigrant." It does not take very acute reasoning to perceive that if such a proposal were ever to become law, it would not be very long before there would have to be a universal minimum wage for everyone.
On the other hand, Mr. Edward B. Whitney in his Memorandum appended to the Report of the Commission of the State of New York argues thus in discussing the claim made by the majority of the Commission that certain special help and protection is needed by the alien. He asks "whether, if a further extension of this kind of state charity is to be made, it would not be better to take up something for the benefit of our own citizens or for the benefit of citizen and alien alike." Mr. Whitney is entirely logical. Only progress rarely takes place for logical reasons, or on lines dictated by logic, but it does in almost all cases follow the line of least resistance, and the wise progressive accepts gratefully whatever he can get, without being too anxious as to whether it seems to be logically the next step or not.
The immigrant has hitherto been used as an excuse to permit the dehumanizing of our cities; he has been used industrially as an instrument to make life harder for the hardly pressed classes of workers whom he joined on his arrival here. That such has been his sorry function has been his misfortune as well as theirs. Would it not be equally natural and far more fair to utilize his presence among us to raise our civic and economic and industrial standards? It is no new story, this. Out of every social problem we can construct a stepping-stone to something better and higher than was before. The most that we know of health has been learned through a study of the misadjustments that bring about disease. What has been done educationally to assist the defective, the handicapped and the dependent has thrown a flood of light upon the training of the normal child. Through work undertaken in the first instance for the benefit of the exceptions, the minority, the whole community has benefited.
In this connection no one will deny that immigrants, both men and women, have their handicaps. In the great majority of instances they are handicapped by an upbringing among primitive conditions, by their unavoidable ignorance of our language and our customs, and by a quite natural mental confusion as to our standards of conduct, to them so curiously exacting in some respects as, for instance, where the schooling of their children is concerned, so incomprehensibly lax in others, say, in the unusual freedom accorded to those same children when grown but a little older.
We shall find that whatever we do for the immigrant will be, in the end, so much accomplished for the good of all. Let us lessen this unfair pressure upon him, as far as we can, and we shall surely find that in helping him to help himself, we have, at the same time, benefited all workers.
It is easy to see that the great strikes in the sewing and textile trades of the last few years have proved a searchlight especially into women's industrial conditions, educating the whole public by informing them of the terrible price paid for our comfort by the makers of the commonest articles of household purchase and use, the sacrifice of youth, health, happiness, and life itself demanded by any industry which exacts of the employés cruelly long hours of work at an exhausting speed, and which for such overwork pays them wretchedly.
These uprisings have besides stimulated to an encouraging degree the forming of an intelligent public opinion upon the problem of the immigrant, and a wholesomely increased sense of responsibility towards the immigrant. And indeed it was time. Miss Grace Abbott, director of the Chicago League for the Protection of Immigrants, tells a story, illustrating how very unintelligent an educated professional man can be in relation to immigrant problems.