The foreigner is in the city; he will chiefly stay there; and the question is what can be done to improve his city environment; for the perils to which we refer are primarily due not to the foreigner himself but to the evil and vice-breeding conditions in which he has to exist. These imperil him and make him a peril in turn. The overcrowded tenements and slums, the infection of long-entrenched corruption, the absence of light, fresh air, and playgrounds for the children, the unsanitary conditions and exorbitant rents, the political heelers teaching civic corruption, the saloons with their attendant temptations to vice and crime, the fraudulent naturalization--these work together upon the immigrant, for his undoing and thus to the detriment of the nation. When we permit such an environment to exist, and practically force the immigrant into it because we do not want him for a next-door neighbor, we can hardly condemn him for forming foreign colonies which maintain foreign customs and are impervious to American influences. It has too long been the common practice to lay everything to the foreigner. Would it not be fairer and more Christian to distribute the blame, and assume that part of it which belongs to us. In the study of the facts contained in this chapter, put yourself persistently in the place of the immigrant, suddenly introduced into the conditions here pictured, and ask yourself what you would probably be and become in like circumstances. [Sidenote: A Call for Reform] How the other half lives is not the only mystery. How little the so-called upper-ten know how the lower-ninety live. And how little you and I, who are fortunate to count ourselves in the next upper-twenty, perhaps, know how the under-seventy exist and think and do. If only the more fortunate thirty per cent. knew of the exact conditions under which a large proportion of men, women, and children carry on the pitiful struggle for mere existence, there would be an irresistible demand for betterment. Every Christian ought to know the wrongs of our civilization, in order that he may help to right them. This glimpse beneath the surface of the city should stir us out of comfortable complacency and give birth in us to the impulse that leads to settlement and city mission work, and to civic reform movements. The young men and women of America must create a public sentiment that will demolish the slums, and erect in their places model tenements; that will tear down the rookeries, root out the saloons and dens of vice, and provide the children with playgrounds and breathing space. And this work will be directly in the line of Americanizing and evangelizing the immigrants, for they are chiefly the occupants and victims of the tenements and the slums. [Sidenote: Vanishing Americanism]