learn the language of the land, I regret to say
that it is often tinctured with the language of the Bowery, in from six
to twelve weeks, six weeks for the Jews, and twelve for the slower among
the Germans' children. And again, it will be difficult to stir Otto
Schmidt, at any stage of his career, into antagonism against the Jewish
race, when he remembers the patience and loving kindness with which
Maxie Fishandler labored with him and guided his first steps through the
wilderness of the English tongue.

These indirect but constant influences are undeniably the strongest, but
at school the child is taught in history of the heroism and the strength
of men and nations other than his own; he learns, with some degree of
consternation, that Christopher Columbus was a "Dago," George Washington
an officer in the English Army, and Christ, our Lord, a Jew. Geography,
as it is now taught with copious illustrations and descriptions, shows
undreamed-of beauties in countries hitherto despised. And gradually, as
the pupils move on from class to class, they learn true democracy and
man's brotherhood to man.

But the work of the American public school does not stop with the
children who come directly under its control. The board of education
reaches, as no other organization does, the great mass of the
population. All the other boards and departments established for the
help and guidance of these people only succeed in badgering and
frightening them. They are met, even at Ellis Island, by the board of
health and they are subjected to all kinds of disagreeable and
humiliating experiences culminating sometimes in quarantine and
sometimes in deportation. Even after they have passed the barrier of the
emigration office, the monster still pursues them. It disinfects their
houses, it confiscates the rotten fish and vegetables which they
hopefully display on their push-carts, it objects to their wrenching off
and selling the plumbing appliances in their apartments, it interferes
with them in twenty ways a day and hedges them round about with a
hundred laws which they can only learn, as Parnell advised a follower to
learn the rules of the House of Commons, by breaking them.

Then comes the department of street cleaning, with its extraordinary
ideas of the use of a thoroughfare. The new-comer is taught that the
street is not the place for dead cats and cabbage stalks, and other
trifles for which he has no further use. Neither may it be used, e