ted be
removed from their back-doors. How much of the high infant death-rate
among stockyards families has been due to the garbage exposed and
decaying, so carefully brought there, from the fine residential
districts?

Legally the alien suffers under a burden of disabilities of which he
is usually wholly unaware, until he has broken some law or regulation
devised, it would appear, often for his discomfiture, rather than
for anyone's else benefit. These laws and regulations, in themselves
sometimes just and sometimes unjust, make up a mass of the most
inconsistent legislation. State laws, varying from state to state, and
city ordinances equally individual limit the employment of aliens
on public work. Peddlers' and fishers' licenses come under similar
restrictions; so with the owning of property, the right to leave
property by will, say, to a wife and children in Europe, and the right
even to protection of life, in violation of treaty rights. "The state
courts have never punished a single outrage of this kind" [violence at
the hands of a mob]. The federal government, Miss Kellor states, makes
a payment to a victim's heirs out of a secret service fund "if the
ambassador is persistent, and threatens to withdraw from Washington if
the murder of his countrymen is not to be punished."

These are all most serious handicaps, and certainly the need for
investigation of all laws, the codifying of many, and the abolition of
some is urgent.

If some of these handicaps were lifted from the immigrant, complaint
against under-cutting competition of cheap foreign labor would largely
cease, and the task of organizers among the foreign workers would be
much simplified, even while we are waiting for the day when it will be
possible for all to obtain work without turning others out of their
jobs, which can only come about when we produce intelligently for the
use of all, instead of for the profit of the exceptional few.

Here and there work on the lines sketched out is beginning, even
though much of it is as yet unrelated to the rest. The community is
making headway, in the acknowledgment by various states, headed by New
York, of the just claim of the immigrant, once he is admitted within
our borders, to the protection of the government. For long after
the Federal authorities took over the control of immigration, their
concern was limited to some degree of restriction over the entry
of foreigners, and the enforcement of deportation, w