ind. And as with religion, so it fared with other branches of our
domestic education. Chaos took the place of system; uncertainty,
inconsistency undermined discipline. My parents knew only that they
desired us to be like American children; and seeing how their
neighbors gave their children boundless liberty, they turned us also
loose, never doubting but that the American way was the best way. In
public deportment, in etiquette, in all matters of social intercourse,
they had no standards to go by, seeing that America was not Polotzk.
In their bewilderment and uncertainty they needs must trust us
children to learn from such models as the tenements afforded. More
than this, they must step down from their throne of parental
authority, and take the law from their children's mouths; for they had
no other means of finding out what was good American form. The result
was that laxity of domestic organization, that inversion of normal
relations which makes for friction, and which sometimes ends in
breaking up a family that was formerly united and happy.

This sad process of disintegration of home life may be observed in
almost any immigrant family of our class and with our traditions and
aspirations. It is part of the process of Americanization; an upheaval
preceding the state of repose. It is the cross that the first and
second generations must bear, an involuntary sacrifice for the sake of
the future generations. These are the pains of adjustment, as racking
as the pains of birth. And as the mother forgets her agonies in the
bliss of clasping her babe to her breast, so the bent and heart-sore
immigrant forgets exile and homesickness and ridicule and loss and
estrangement, when he beholds his sons and daughters moving as
Americans among Americans.

On Wheeler Street there were no real homes. There were miserable flats
of three or four rooms, or fewer, in which families that did not
practise race suicide cooked, washed, and ate; slept from two to four
in a bed, in windowless bedrooms; quarrelled in the gray morning, and
made up in the smoky evening; tormented each other, supported each
other, saved each other, drove each other out of the house. But there
was no common life in any form that means life. There was no room for
it, for one thing. Beds and cribs took up most of the floor space,
disorder packed the interspaces. The centre table in the "parlor" was
not loaded with books. It held, invariably, a photograph album and an
or