In consideration of all this business of naturalization, and the various projects for improving its conditions, it must be remembered that it is only within very recent years--virtually only since the beginning of the World War with its suddenly aroused or anyway suddenly accentuated excitements of interracial friction here in America, and of ebullitions of loyalty to the various fatherlands engaged in that struggle, on the part of foreign-born residents here--that the people of the United States, of this generation at least, have taken any interest in the behavior, affairs, and assimilation of the alien. It is two-thirds of a century, more or less, since the subsidence of the last important uproar on the subject. A few social-settlement workers and missionaries in the great cities, a few writers on sociological subjects, here and there some more than ordinarily facile and entertaining writer in English among the foreign born themselves, have tried to draw public attention to the seriousness and magnitude of the problem growing within our national life. These have pleaded for a better understanding of the people of other races coming in vast floods to make their homes with us, and for better conditions to govern their assimilation. But Americans generally pursued their self-absorbed, happy-go-lucky way, giving little attention to these Jeremiahs and Cassandras; pooh-poohed at the warnings, or vaguely hoped that all would come out right in time. Meanwhile, most of them followed the usual human course of shrinking from all avoidable human contact with these outlandish folk of language and customs different from their own; rather glad, on the whole, that they herded, as people in strange climes will, in congested “Little Italys,” “Little Hungarys,” “Deutschlands,” and “Ghettoes”--and in “slums” in general. They surrendered to foreign colonies not only abandoned farm-lands, but even large portions of great cities and great states; vaguely grumbling when they perceived that great political power went with that growth of foreign-speaking population. As a whole, they washed their hands of the whole matter, or at most viewed the encroachment with more or less solicitous disdain. Meanwhile, most of those who have recognized the existence of a menacing problem have acquired, generally on the foundation of the subtle race-prejudice to which most of us are subject, a vast deal of misinformation on the subject--some of it in the form of widely accepted misinterpretations of official and quasi-official “statistics.” VII SOME STATISTICS CONCERNING IMMIGRANTS, “NEW” AND “OLD”