It is common to sneer at the city workingman because he stays in town unemployed when he might get a job in the wheat fields or at mining or fruit picking where labor is scant. Laying aside the question of any desire on his part to stay with his family, or any doubt in his mind about his ability as a hodcarrier or a tailor to make good as a farm hand, or any reluctance on the part of the railroad to assist him with the gift or loan of transportation to some distant and practically most uncertain job--what becomes in such a hop-skip-and-jump sort of industrial--and social-existence, of any interest in civic affairs? To a newly made citizen, who has faithfully memorized, if you please, the Constitution of the United States, who knows just how Senators are elected and what is the relation between the functions of the President and those of the local dog-catcher, and who can sing, duly standing uncovered, _all_ the stanzas of the “Star-Spangled Banner,” it must appear that his intellectual equipment for citizenship is more or less extraneous to the practical and immediate task of feeding his wife and babies! It is this sort of experience, of shifting employment and residence and the conditions that go with it, that has given momentum to the I. W. W. and kindred movements. “Stag towns” in the Far West, matching “women towns” in New England; permanently separated families; the utter impossibility of getting and keeping wives or maintaining any sort of decent, not to say normal, domestic life, are major factors that have brought into such organizations not only foreign-born wanderers, some of them naturalized, but a surprisingly large number of native Americans--the latter particularly among the leadership. On the other hand, the I. W. W. from its beginning[176] has paid close attention to the immigrant. Fifteen years ago, at the second convention of the I. W. W., it was urged that propaganda should start in Europe before the immigrant left the homeland, so that he would be prepared upon arrival in this country to join the organization. This was not done, but even so early there was a large issue of printed matter in foreign languages, and the whole machinery was conceived on the presumption of a polyglot membership. Moreover, the I. W. W. always has taken the most liberal position as regards any form of race prejudice. At the opening of the first convention William D. Haywood took a strong stand against discrimination against the negro by craft unions, and the organization never has tolerated any distinction of race, color, nationality--or sex. Even with regard to the Japanese of California, at the third convention a delegate from that state declared that “the whole fight against the Japanese is the fight of the middle class of California, in which they employ the labor faker to back it up.”