How did the foreign-born voter respond to this effort and propaganda? The answer to this question, as found all through the twenty-odd years before the entrance of the United States into the war, is one of the most heartening things in American politics. But this statement must be taken with discrimination, and subject to certain qualifications. The League has had its hardest fights, and produced the least results, in those wards where solid blocks of immigrants of some one racial complexion encouraged a racial isolation; or where great masses of population were under the domination of some reactionary political or religious leadership, having some interest in maintaining a subservient representation in the City Hall. In the centers of poverty, where political strength is maintained by leaders of the old type through control of day-labor jobs, gifts of coal, shoes, and other forms of charity, it is difficult to interest a population to whom even a vision of clean streets is of importance secondary to to-day’s experience of empty stomachs. In a general way it may be said that the degree of response to movements like the Municipal Voters’ League is roughly commensurate with the degree of material prosperity. As the immigrant gains in quality and wage-return of his job, acquaintance with American essentials, and comfort of material surroundings, he gains interest in the ethical aspect of community life. But the uplifting influence of a campaign like that of the League penetrates even into the most obdurate regions. The Seventeenth Ward of Chicago was long the scene of one of the hardest fights of the League. Through the hard work of Prof. Graham Taylor and the group of good citizens centering in and about the Chicago-Commons social settlement, the work came to great success--and held it--as long as the population was characteristically Scandinavian, German, Scotch, and Irish. In recent years, however, these people gradually moved out of the ward, and it came to be heavily Polish, under the domination of a reactionary control of the Polish Catholic Church. This element always has been hard to influence, and its priests are active directly in politics. Nevertheless, in a recent aldermanic campaign, a Polish Catholic alderman running for re-election told at a public meeting how his daughter came home from school crying, with a newspaper in her hand, demanding to know what her father had done to justify the newspapers in saying he had a bad record--his record set forth in cold type by the Municipal Voters’ League. This alderman at that meeting declared that he had been receiving patronage for his vote in the council, that he was going to drop that, try hereafter to serve the best interests of his ward, and make a record of which his children could be proud.