use he clings
to foreign customs and ideas.

I do not fear foreigners half so much as I fear Americans who impose on
them and brutally abuse them. Such Americans are the most dangerous
enemies to our institutions, utterly foreign to their true spirit. Such
Americans are the real foreigners.

Most of those who come to us are predisposed in favor of our
institutions. They are generally unacquainted with the true character of
those institutions, but they all know that America is the land of
freedom and of plenty, and they are favorably inclined toward the ideas
and the obligations which are bound up with these blessings. They are
open to American influence, and quickly respond to a new and a better
environment.

They naturally look up to us, and if with fair and friendly treatment we
win their confidence, they are easily transformed into enthusiastic
Americans. But if by terms of opprobrium, such as "sheeny" and "dago,"
we convince them that they are held in contempt, and if by oppression
and fraud we render them suspicious of us, we can easily compact them
into masses, hostile to us and dangerous to our institutions and
organized for the express purpose of resisting all Americanizing
influences.

Whether immigrants remain _Aliens_ or become _Americans_ depends less on
them than on ourselves.

JOSIAH STRONG.
_New York, June 26, 1906._

_We may well ask whether this insweeping immigration is to
foreignize us, or we are to Americanize it. Our safety demands the
assimilation of these strange populations, and the process of
assimilation becomes slower and more difficult as the proportion of
foreigners increases._

--Josiah Strong.

THE ALIEN ADVANCE

"And ELISHA prayed, and said, Jehovah, I pray thee, open his
eyes, that he may see. And Jehovah opened the eyes of the young man: and
he saw" (2 Kings vi. 17). Elisha's prayer is peculiarly fitting now. The
first need of American Protestantism is for clear vision, to discern the
supreme issues involved in immigration, recognize the spiritual
significance and divine providence in and behind this marvelous
migration of peoples, and so see Christian obligation as to rise to the
mission of evangelizing these representatives of all nations gathered on
American soil.--_The Author._

Out of the remote and little-known regions of northern, eastern, and
southern Euro