t only left the soil in
whose culture his ancestors had been established for generations, he has
left the tradition and the discipline which have made him what he is.
The necessary readjustments are immensely difficult. For the first
generation they are largely a dumb puzzle, or a dull, aching
homesickness or a gray laborious life whose outcome must be often
strangely different from their dreams, but for the second generation the
whole experience is a heady adventure in freedom not easy to analyze
though social workers generally are agreed that the children of the
immigrant, belonging neither to the old nor the new, are a disturbing
element in American life. A city like Detroit, in which this is being
written, where both movements combine, the American country and village
dweller coming to a highly specialized industrial center and the
European immigrant to an entirely new environment, illustrates the
complex issue of the whole process.

It is just to note that the Catholic immigrant, finding in his Church
the one homelike thing, is often a better Catholic in America than he
was at home. A Protestant writer without accurate information would not
dare to generalize on the religious dislocation of the second Catholic
generation. But there must be a very great loss. The large non-churched
elements in our population must be in part due to Catholic
disintegration as they are certainly due to Protestant disintegration.
And new movements find their opportunity in this whole group. In
general, society, through such influences, has grown impatient of
discipline, scornful of old methods, contemptuous of experience and
strangely unwilling to pay the price of the best. The more unstable have
surrendered themselves to the lure of the short cut; they are persuaded
that there are quick and easy roads to regions of well-being which had
before been reached only through labour and discipline and much travail
of body, mind and soul.

_Popular Education Has Done Little to Correct Current Confusions_

Nor has the very great extension of popular education really done much
to correct this; it seems rather to intensify it, for education shared
and shares still the temper of the time. Our education has been more
successful generally in opening vistas than in creating an understanding
of the laws of life and the meaning of experience; it has given us a
love of speculation without properly trained minds; it has furnished us
with the catch wo