first instance for the benefit
of the exceptions, the minority, the whole community has benefited.

In this connection no one will deny that immigrants, both men and
women, have their handicaps. In the great majority of instances they
are handicapped by an upbringing among primitive conditions, by their
unavoidable ignorance of our language and our customs, and by a quite
natural mental confusion as to our standards of conduct, to them
so curiously exacting in some respects as, for instance, where the
schooling of their children is concerned, so incomprehensibly lax in
others, say, in the unusual freedom accorded to those same children
when grown but a little older.

We shall find that whatever we do for the immigrant will be, in the
end, so much accomplished for the good of all. Let us lessen this
unfair pressure upon him, as far as we can, and we shall surely find
that in helping him to help himself, we have, at the same time,
benefited all workers.

It is easy to see that the great strikes in the sewing and textile
trades of the last few years have proved a searchlight especially into
women's industrial conditions, educating the whole public by informing
them of the terrible price paid for our comfort by the makers of the
commonest articles of household purchase and use, the sacrifice of
youth, health, happiness, and life itself demanded by any industry
which exacts of the employes cruelly long hours of work at an
exhausting speed, and which for such overwork pays them wretchedly.

These uprisings have besides stimulated to an encouraging degree the
forming of an intelligent public opinion upon the problem of the
immigrant, and a wholesomely increased sense of responsibility towards
the immigrant. And indeed it was time. Miss Grace Abbott, director of
the Chicago League for the Protection of Immigrants, tells a story,
illustrating how very unintelligent an educated professional man can
be in relation to immigrant problems.

"Not long ago," she says, "I listened to a paper by a sanitary
engineer, on the relation between the immigrant and public health. It
was based on a study of typhoid fever in a certain city in the United
States. He showed that most typhoid epidemics started among our
foreign colonies, and spread to other sections. This, he explained, is
because the foreigner has been accustomed to a pure water supply, and
is therefore much more susceptible to typhoid than the American
who has struggled since