"It is a vast procession of varied humanity. In tongue it is polyglot; in dress all climes from pole to equator are indicated, and all religions and beliefs enlist their followers. There is no age limit, for young and old travel side by side. There is no sex limitation, for the women are as keen as, if not more so than, the men; and babes in arms are here in no mean numbers. The army carries its equipment on its back, but in no prescribed form. The allowance is meager, it is true, but the household gods of a family sprung from the same soil as a hundred previous generations may possibly be contained in shapeless bags or bundles. Forever moving, always in the same direction, this marching army comes out of the shadow, converges to natural points of distribution, masses along the international highways, and its vanguard disappears, absorbed where it finds a resting-place."[1] [Sidenote: The Ellis Island Inflow] See the living stream pour into America through the raceway of Ellis Island.[2] There is no such sight to be seen elsewhere on the planet. Suppose for the moment that all the immigrants of 1905 came in by that wide open way, as eight tenths of them actually did. If your station had been by that gateway, where you could watch the human tide flowing through, and if the stream had been steady, on every day of the 365 you would have seen more than 2,800 living beings--men, women, and children, of almost every conceivable condition except that of wealth or eminence--pass from the examination "pens" into the liberty of American opportunity. Since the stream was spasmodic, its numbers did reach as high in a single day as 11,343. [Sidenote: A Motley Procession] Imagine an army of nearly 20,000 a week marching in upon an unprotected country. At the head come the motley and strange-looking migrants--largely refugee Jews--from the far Russian Empire and the regions of Hungary and Roumania. At the daily rate of 2,800 it would take this indescribable assortment more than 166 days to pass in single file. Then the Italians would consume about eighty days more. For over eight months you would have watched so large a proportion of illiteracy, incompetency, and insensibility to American ideals, that you would be tempted to despair of the Republic. Nor would you lose the sense of nightmare when the English and Irish were consuming forty-two days in passing, for the "green" of the Emerald Isle is vivid at Ellis Island, and the best class of the English stay at home. The flaxen-haired and open-faced Scandinavians would lighten the picture, but with the equally sturdy Germans they would get by in only a month and four days. [Sidenote: A Process of Enlightenment]