It was partly the sense of the great public danger lying in such conditions, partly the growing anti-foreign feeling, and altogether an improving public morality, that beginning about 1870 and increasing as the years passed, brought about the cleansing of public elections and the reform embodied in the naturalization law of 1906 which has totally abolished the situation into which the immigrants of the mid-century and earlier stepped as into a swamp. Still survives in some quarters the notion that the alien is hurried from the ship to the ballot box, and that he pours therein some corrupting influence brought with him from abroad. The latter never was true; he has accepted and taken advantage of the situation which we ourselves created and suffered for generations to exist. The former was true during three-quarters of a century, but it is true no longer, and has not been true for nearly two decades. FIRST CHOICE IN POLITICS Bear it in mind that the chief motive of the newcomer is the same as that which usually leads men to go anywhere--the desire to “better himself.” It is notable that a very large number of immigrants arrive with the notion that the Republican party is the “party of prosperity,” of the “full dinner pail,” high wages, and the other advantages which have been the widely advertised slogans of that party. Without passing upon the question of the truth of these slogans, one may note that what actually happens is that the immigrant’s real search is for that connection, political or industrial, which involves employment and other advantages of a material kind. As soon as the conditions permit, he joins the penumbra of the political organization which has jobs to distribute, which controls public contracts and the wages that go with them. That means Tammany and the Democratic party in New York City; in Philadelphia it means the Republican organization, which in its day has followed and in some respects surpassed Tammany in all the ways of political corruption and machinism. In other cities it has been to this party or that, as the dominant color shifted, that the immigrant has swung. As long as the naturalization process was the sport of corrupt politics, the political organizations gave early attention to the alien. With the institution of the present stringent law and practice, however, and also with the vast magnitude of the flood--swamping all the machinery which had been devised to absorb the immigrants--the politicians up to a recent time ceased to pay any attention to them. One of the results of this has been a considerable increase in the lapse of time between the arrival of the immigrant and his first steps in the direction of citizenship. One of the most enterprising of the younger leaders of Tammany Hall said to the present writer some months ago: