t is beyond doubt that the men who came over in the early days were, as
a rule, better timber than the ones who come now. They came to live and
die, if necessary, for a religious or a political principle, for
adventure, or like the debtors in Oglethorpe's colony in Georgia, to
wipe clean the slate of the past and begin life again. To-day they come
to make money or because they think they will find life easier here than
it was where they were. And one of the chief reasons for the discontent
and unrest (and, incidentally, rudeness) which prevails among them is
that they find it hard. We are speaking in general terms. There are
glorious exceptions.

The sturdy virtues of the pioneers did not include politeness. They
never do. So long as there is an animal fear of existence man cannot
think of minor elegances. He cannot live by bread alone, but he cannot
live at all without it. Bread must come first. And the Pilgrim Father
was too busy learning how to wring a living from the forbidding rocks of
New England with one hand while he fought off the Indians with the other
to give much time to tea parties and luncheons. Nowhere in America
except in the South, where the leisurely life of the plantations gave
opportunity for it, was any great attention paid to formal courtesy. But
everywhere, as soon as the country had been tamed and prosperity began
to peep over the horizon, the pioneers began to grow polite. They had
time for it.

What we must remember--and this is a reason, not an excuse, for bad
manners--is that these new people coming into the country, the
present-day immigrants, are pioneers, and that the life is not an easy
one whether it is lived among a wilderness of trees and beasts in a
forest or a wilderness of men and buildings in a city. The average
American brings a good many charges against the foreigner--some of them
justified, for much of the "back-wash" of Europe and Asia has drifted
into our harbor--but he must remember this: Whatever his opinion of the
immigrant may be the fault is ours--he came into this country under the
sanction of our laws. And he is entitled to fair and courteous treatment
from every citizen who lives under the folds of the American flag.

The heterogeneous mixture which makes up our population is a serious
obstacle (but not an insuperable one) in the way of courtesy, but there
is another even greater. The first is America's problem. The second
belongs to the world.

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