But the statesman shuts himself away from the possibility of using these great reservoirs of human ability and motive power because he considers it patriotic to hold to governmental lines and ideals laid down a century and a quarter ago. Because of a military inheritance, we as a nation stoutly ( 71) contend that all this varied and suggestive life has nothing to do with government nor patriotism, and that we perform the full duty of American citizens when the provisions of the statutes on naturalization are carried out. In the meantime, in the interests of our theory that commercial and governmental powers should have no connection with each other, we carefully ignore the one million false naturalization papers in the United States issued and concealed by commercialized politics. Although we have an uneasy knowledge that these powers are curiously allied, we profess that the latter has no connection with the former and no control over it. We steadily refuse to recognize the fact that our age is swayed by industrial forces.
Fortunately, life is much bigger and finer than our theories about it, and, among all the immi- grants in the great cities, there is slowly developing the beginnings of self-government on the lines of their daily experiences.
The man who really knows immigrants and undertakes to naturalize them, makes no pretense of the lack of connection between their desire to earn their daily bread and their citizenship. The petty and often corrupt politician who is first kind to immigrants, realizes perfectly well that the force pushing them to this country has been industrial need and that ( 72) recognition of this need is legitimate. He follows the natural course of events when he promises to get the immigrant "a job,"for that is undoubtedly what the immigrant most needs in all the world.
If the politician nearest to him were really interested in the immigrant and were to work out a scheme of naturalization fitted to the situation, the immigrant would proceed from the street-cleaning and sewer-digging in which he first engages, to an understanding of the relation of these simple offices to city government. Through them he would understand the obligation of his alderman to secure cleanliness for the streets in which his children play and for the tenement in which he lives. The notion of representative government could be made quite clear and concrete to him.
He could demand his rights and use his vote in order to secure them. His very naive demands might easily become a restraint, a purifying check upon the alderman, instead of a source of constant corruption and exploitation.
But when the politician attempts to naturalize the bewildered immigrant, he must perforce accept the doctrinaire standard imposed by men who held a theory totally unattached to experience, and he must, therefore, begin with the remote Constitution of the United States. At the Cook County Court-House only a short time ago a can-( 73)-didate for naturalization, who was asked the usual question as to what the Constitution of the United States was, replied:
"The Illinois Central." His mind naturally turned to his work, to the one bit of contribution he had genuinely made to the new country, and his reply might well offer a valuable suggestion to the student of educational method.
Some of our most ad vanced schools are even now making industrial construction and evolution a natural basis for all future acquisition of knowledge, and they claim that anything less vital and creative is inadequate.
It is surprising how a simple experience, if it be but genuine, gives an opening into citizenship altogether lacking to the more grandiose attempts.
A Greek-American, slaughtering sheep in a tenement- house yard, reminiscent of the Homeric tradition, can be made to see the effect of the improvised shambles on his neighbor's health and the right of the city to prohibit the slaughtering, only as he perceives the development of city government upon its most modern basis.
The enforcement of adequate child labor laws offers unending opportunity to better citizenship founded, not upon theory but on action, as does the compulsory education law, which makes clear that education is a matter of vital importance to the American city and to the State which has ( 74) enacted definite, well-considered legislation in r yard to it. Some of the most enthusiastic sup- porters of child-labor legislation and of compul- very education laws are those parents who sacri-fice old-world tradition, as well as the much needed earnings of their young children, because of loyalty to the laws of their adopted country Certainly genuine sacrifice for the nation's law i a good foundation for patriotism, and as this again is not a doctrinaire question, women are not debarred, and mothers who wash and scrub for the meagre support of their children say: sturdily, sometimes: "It will be a year before he can go to work without breaking the law, but we came to this country to give the young ones a chance, and we are not going to begin by having them do what's not right."Upon some such basis as this the Hebrew Alliance and the Charity Organization of New York, which are putting forth desperate energy in the enormous task of ministering to the suffering which immigration entails, are developing understanding and respect for the alien through their mutual efforts to secure more adequate tenement-house regulation and to control the spread of tuberculosis; both these undertakings being perfectly hopeless without the intelligent co-operation of the immigrants them-( 75)-selves. Through such humble doors, perchance, the immigrant will at last enter into his heritage in a new nation. Democratic government has ever been the result of spiritual travail and moral effort.
