immigrant is a citizen of a new factory, of the great industrial state, within, yet almost overshadowing the political state. Into each of our problems-wages and labor, illiteracy, crime, vice, insanity, pauperism, democracy-the immigrant enters.

There is in all the world no more difficult, no more utterly bewildering problem than this of the intermingling of races. Already twenty million immigrants have come to stay. To interpret this pouring of new, strange millions into the old, to trace its results upon the manners, the morals, the emotional and intellectual reactions of the Americans, is like searching out the yellow waters of the Missouri in the vast floods of the lower Mississippi. Our immigrating races are many, and they meet diverse kinds of native Americans on varying planes and at innumerable contact points. So complex is the resulting pattern, so multifarious are the threads interwoven into so many perplexing combinations, that we struggle in vain to unweave the weaving.

When we compare the America of today with the America of half a century ago, certain differences stand out sharply. America today is far richer. It is also more stratified. Our social gamut has been widened. There are more vivid contrasts, more startling differences, in education and in the general chances of life. We are less rural and more urban, losing the virtues and the vices, the excellences and the stupidities of country life, and gaining those of the city. We are massing in our cities armies of the poor to take the places of country ne'er-do-wells. We are more sophisticated. We are more lax and less narrow. We have lost our early frugal simplicity, and have become extravagant. We have, in short, created a new type of the American, who lives in the city, who reads newspapers and even books, bathes frequently, travels occasionally; a man fluent intellectually and physically restless, ready but not profound, intent upon success, not without idealism, but somewhat disillusioned, pleasure-loving, hard-working, humorous. At the same time there grows a sense of a social maladjustment, a sense of failure in America to live up to expectations, and an intensifying desire to right a not clearly perceived wrong. There develops a vigorous, if somewhat vague and untrained, moral impulse based on social rather than individual ethics, unaesthetic, democratic, headlong.

Although this development might have come about in part at least without immigration the process has been enormously accelerated by the arrival on our shores of millions of Europeans. These men came to make a living, and they made not only their own but other men's fortunes. They hastened the dissolution of old- conditions; they undermined old standards by introducing new; their

very traditions facilitated the growth of that traditionless quality of the American mind which hastened our material transformation.

Because of his position at the bottom of a stratified society the immigrant does not exert any large direct influence. His indirect influence, on the other hand, is increased rather than diminished by his position at the bottom of the structure. When he moves, all superincumbent groups must of necessity shift their positions. This indirect influence is manifold. The immigration of enormous numbers of unskilled "interchangeable" laborers, who can be moved about like pawns, standardizes our industries, facilitates the growth of stupendous business units, and generally promotes plasticity. The immigrant by his very readiness to be used speeds us up; he accelerates the whole tempo of our industrial life. He changes completely the "balance of power" in industry, politics, and social life generally. The feverish speed of our labor, which is so largely pathological, is an index of this. The arrival of ever fresh multitudes adds to the difficulties of securing a democratic control of either industry or politics. The presence of the unskilled, unlettered immigrant excites the cupidity of men who wish to make money quickly and do not care how. It makes an essentially kind-hearted people callous. Why save the lives of "wops"? What does it matter if our industry kills a few thousands more or less, when, if we wish, we can get millions a year from inexhaustible Europe? Immigration acts to destroy our brakes. It keeps us, as a nation, transitional.

Of course this transitional quality was due partly to our virgin. continent. There was always room in the West. Immigration, however, intensified and protracted the development. Each race had to fight for its place. Natives were displaced by Irish, who were displaced in turn by Germans, Russians, Italians, Portuguese, Greeks, Syrians. Whole trades were destroyed by one nation and conquered by another. 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 towheaded Slavs. Protestant churches were stranded in Catholic or Jewish neighborhoods. America changed rapidly, feverishly. The rush and recklessness of our lives were increased by the mild, lawabiding people who came to us from abroad.

There was a time when all these qualities 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 eastern mills or on western farms without injury to others—or to himself.

The time has passed when we believed that mere numbers was all. Today, despite the 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 on life. We, the many-nationed nation of America, bring the Puritan tradition, a trifle anæmic 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 our vices, to imitate us for better or for worse. All of which hampers and delays the formation of 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 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 are sharply accentuated by our enormous development of university and high schools at one end, and by the increasing illiteracy of our immigrants at the other.

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 industrial transformation, has been slower and less complete. It has been retarded by the very rapidity of our immigration. 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.

H. THE QUALITY OF POPULATION

43

249. The Breeding of Men13

BY PLATO

"Then tell me, Glaucon, how is this result to be attained? For I know that you keep in your house both sporting dogs and a great number of game birds. I conjure you, therefore, to inform me

Adapted from The Republic, V, 459–460 (385 B. C.).

whether you have paid any attention to the breeding of these animals."

"In what respect?"

"In the first place, though all are well bred, are there not some which are, or grow to be, superior to the rest?"

"There are."

"Do you then breed from all alike, or are you anxious to breed as far as possible from the best?"

"From the best."

"And if you were to pursue

different course, do you think that

your breed of birds and dogs would degenerate very much?"

"I do."

"Good heavens! my dear friend," I exclaimed, "what very firstrate men our rulers ought to be, if the analogy holds with respect to the human race."

"Well, it certainly does."

"The best of both sexes ought to be brought together as often as possible, and the worst as seldom as possible, and the issue of the former unions ought to be reared, and that of the latter abandoned, if the flock is to attain first-rate excellence."

"You are perfectly right."

"Then we shall have to ordain certain festivals at which we shall bring together the brides and bridegrooms, and we must have sacrifices performed, and hymns composed by our poets in strains appropriate to the occasion; but the number of marriages we shall place under the control of the magistrates, in order that they may, as far as they can, keep the population at the same point, taking into consideration the effects of war and disease, and all such agents, that our city may, to the best of our power, be prevented from becoming either too great or too small."

250. Derby Day and Social Reform"

SIR: Which is wrong-the breeder of race horses or Mr. LloydGeorge? Would racing men do better with their animals if they adopted all the methods which Parliament has imposed upon us in recent years as the right way to improve the efficiency of the human race? How would it be if they swept up the whole equine progeny of the country, each generation as it came, and applied social reform to it-if they provided it with stables sanitarily inspected, if they

"A letter published in the London Times, May 26, 1909.

caused all its units to pass under the hands of certified trainers, if they pensioned off the old hacks, and provided bank holidays for the young, and, finally, if they left the whole question of the breeding of the beasts to chance? If English racing men adopted our governmental system, is it not certain that English race horses would be beaten everywhere by horses bred by selection? Yet no one suggests any interference with the breeding of the human race. It is only royal marriages that have to be publicly approved. My suggestion that the same kind of interference should be applied to the marriages of peers has not exactly "caught on." In their case the hereditary principle is accepted but not scientifically applied.

Not only does Parliament in its so-called wisdom fail to apply science to the production of hereditary legislators, but in all recent social legislation it has actually penalized the fitter classes in society in the interests of the less fit. The least fit in the country are the old people who have failed to provide any savings against their old age, and that large class of cheats who manage to pretend that they are in that case. An as yet uncounted number of millions sterling is now to be taken year after year from the fitter classes and doled out to these unfittest. No one can tell how many children that would have been born to these fitter parents will now have to go unborn. The old people used to be supported by their relations, who presumably inherited a like unfitness; those relatives, now indirectly endowed, can now produce more children in place of the fitter children whose entry into the world has been blocked. All so-called social legislation tends to act in the same way. The birth rate of the fitter is diminishing year by year and we calmly sit by and watch the consequent degeneration of our race with idle hands. We take the human rubbish that emerges and give it compulsory education, housing acts, inspection of all sorts and at all seasons, at the expense of the fitter class, and imagine that better results will ensue than if we left the whole business alone. Are we right? Or are the horse breeders right? They have demonstrably improved the race of horses, and with great rapidity. The old system of "let alone" also improved, though more slowly, the race of men. It is only the modern system of penalizing the fit for the sake of the unfit that seems to be put in action simultaneously with, if it does not cause, an observed race-degeneration.

I am, Sir, yours faithfully,

MARTIN CONWAY