issionary
work in America is that the foreigner ceases to believe his traditional
faith, refuses allegiance to any American substitute and becomes an
infidel agnostic or atheist. The same thing is just as common in the
realms of social, ethical and political faith as in that of religious
belief.

Respect for Government and law is not a natural instinct. It is an
artificial attitude slowly built up in the individual by all sorts of
direct and indirect social pressure. The breakdown of old habits of
thought in any one of the great departments of social activity very
rapidly affects the other phases of conduct. The whole moral life of
the individual tends to become unsettled. Nothing is held firmly
except the selfish determination to obtain material wealth. Ideas and
ideals which stand in the way of this are cast aside. The Americanized
foreigner possesses all the native Americans' ruthless greed without
possessing his social, ethical, religious, or political idealism.

No man can learn a language perfectly who learns it deliberately, and
social ideals are harder to learn than language. They can never be
learned naturally and completely except when they are learned so
gradually and imperceptibly that the process is unrecognized and
largely unconscious. This can never be possible in the case of the
foreign born, and is only very partially attainable in the case of the
children foreign born. Its complete realization is possible only in
the case of children born and reared in an entirely American
environment. That is to say it cannot be accomplished before the third
generation at the earliest, and often not then.

II. THE FAD OF AMERICANIZATION

_By Glenn Frank in the "Century Magazine," June, 1920_.

We are a nation of confirmed uplifters. We are never happy except when
we are reforming something or saving somebody. It doesn't matter
greatly whom we are saving or what we are reforming; the game is the
thing. This uplift urge expresses itself in the "movement" mania, the
endemic home of which is United States. The American cannot live by
bread alone; he must have committees, clubs, constitutions, by-laws,
platforms, and resolutions. These things, the machinery of uplift are
his meat and wine. The American society women takes to "social
service" and the American business man to "public work" as a bird takes
to the air or a hound to the trail. It is in the blood.

Just now the most popular social spor