t also
to sensuality and even crime. Added to the various physical causes are
such psychical influences as contact with degraded minds or with base
literature or art, loss of religious faith, and loss of
self-confidence as to one's ability to succeed.

Personal degeneracy tends to perpetuate itself in the family. Drunken,
depraved, or feeble-minded parents usually produce children with the
same inheritances or tendencies; family quarrelling and an utter
absence of moral training do not foster the development of character.
A slum environment in the city strengthens the evil tendencies of such
a home, as it counterbalances the good effects of a wholesome home
environment. Mental and moral degeneracy is always present in society,
and if unchecked spreads widely; physical degeneracy is so common as
to be alarming, resulting in dangerous forms of disease, imbecility,
and insanity. Society is waking to the need of protecting itself
against degeneracy in all its forms, and of cutting out the roots of
the evil from the social body.

READING REFERENCES

NEARING: _Social Religion_, pages 104-157.

COMMONS: "Is Class Conflict in America Growing?" art. in _American
Journal of Sociology_, 13: 756-783.

HENDERSON: _Social Elements_, pages 276-283.

NEARING AND WATSON: _Economics_, pages 185-193.

WARNER: _American Charities_, pages 59-117, 276-292.

PATTEN: _Social Basis of Religion_, pages 107-133.

BLACKMAR AND GILLIN: _Outlines of Sociology_, pages 499-512.

CHAPTER XXX

THE IMMIGRANT

228. =The Immigrant Problem.=--An increasing proportion of the city's
population is foreign born or of foreign parentage. For a hundred
years America has been the goal of the European peasant's ambition,
the magnet that has drawn him from interior hamlet and ocean port.
Migration has been one of the mighty forces that have been reshaping
society. The American people are being altered by it, and it is a
question whether America will maintain its national characteristics if
the volume of immigration continues unchecked. Europe has been deeply
affected, and the people who constitute the migrating mass have been
changed most of all. And the end is not yet.

The immigrant constitutes one of the problems of society. Never has
there been in history such a race movement as that which has added to
one nation a population of more than twenty million in a half century.
It is a problem that affects the welfare of r