on of this desire, the blame for
the civic and moral dangers that will threaten our community, because of
ignorance, vice, and poverty, must rest on the whole public, not on our
foreign-born residents." And Superintendent Maxwell of the Department of
Education adds, six years later, that with a shortage of 28,000 seats,
and worse coming, "it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the
insufficiency of school accommodation in New York City is a most serious
menace to our universal welfare."[27] For we have reached the stage
again, thanks be to four years of Tammany, when, after all the
sacrifices of the past, we are once more face to face with an army of
enforced truants, and all they stand for.

[Footnote 27: Superintendent Maxwell in _Municipal Affairs_,
December, 1900.]

He is clannish, this Italian; he gambles and uses a knife, though rarely
on anybody not of his own people; he "takes what he can get," wherever
anything is free, as who would not, coming to the feast like a starved
wolf? There was nothing free where he came from. Even the salt was taxed
past a poor man's getting any of it. Lastly, he buys fraudulent
naturalization papers, and uses them. I shall plead guilty for him to
every one of these counts. They are all proven. Gambling is his
besetting sin. He is sober, industrious, frugal, enduring beyond belief;
but he will gamble on Sunday and quarrel over his cards, and when he
sticks his partner in the heat of the quarrel, the partner is not apt to
tell. He prefers to bide his time. Yet there has lately been evidence
once or twice, in the surrender of an assassin by his countrymen, that
the old vendetta is being shelved and a new idea of law and justice is
breaking through. As to the last charge: our Italian is not dull. With
his intense admiration for the land where a dollar a day waits upon the
man with a shovel, he can see no reason why he should not accept the
whole "American plan" with ready enthusiasm. It is a good plan. To him
it sums itself up in the statement: a dollar a day for the shovel; two
dollars for the shovel with a citizen behind it. And he takes the papers
and the two dollars.

He came here for a chance to live. Of politics, social ethics, he knows
nothing. Government in his old home existed only for his oppression. Why
should he not attach himself with his whole loyal soul to the plan of
government in his new home that offers to boost him into the place of
his wildest ambitio