rms and
strong courage. It is in the city the shoe pinches. What can we do to
relieve it?

Much could be done with effective inspection on the other side, to
discourage the blind immigration that stops short in the city's slums.
They come to better themselves, and it is largely a question of making
it clear to them that they do not better themselves and make us to be
worse off by staying there, whereas their going farther would benefit
both. But I repeat that that lever must be applied over there, to move
this load. Once they are here, we might have a land and labor bureau
that would take in the whole country, and serve as a great directory and
distributing agency, instead of leaving it to private initiative to take
up the crowds,--something much more comprehensive than anything now
existing. There would still be a surplus; but at least it would be less
by so many as we sent away. And in the nature of things the congestion
would be lessened as more went out. Immigrants go where they have
friends, and if those friends lived in Michigan we should not be
troubled with them long in New York. If the immigration came all from
one country, we should, because of that, have no problem at all, or not
much of one at all events, except perhaps in the Jews, who have lived in
Ghettos since time out of mind. The others would speedily be found
making only a way station of New York. It is the constant kaleidoscopic
change I spoke of that brings us hordes every few years who have to
break entirely new ground. It seems to have been always so. Forty years
after the settlement of Manhattan Island, says Theodore Roosevelt in his
history of New York, eighteen different languages and dialects were
spoken in its streets, though the future metropolis was then but a small
village. "No sooner," says he, "has one set of varying elements been
fused together, than another stream has been poured into the crucible."
What was true of New York two hundred years ago is true to-day of the
country of which it is the gateway.

In dealing with the surplus that remains, we shall have to rely first
and foremost on the public school. Of that I shall speak hereafter. It
can do more and better work than it is doing, for the old as for the
young, when it becomes the real neighborhood centre, especially in the
slums. The flag flies over it, that is one thing, and not such a little
thing as some imagine. I think we are beginning to see it, with our Flag
Day and our