Strange as it may seem, the one human being against whom I never heard a word of censure was President Wilson. In spite of the abuse heaped on him by the newspapers, and the continued faultfinding of their richer fellow citizens, I never heard a tenement woman mention President Wilson’s name, or refer to him, except in praise and gratitude. His pictures in the tenements were almost as numerous as those of the Virgin Mary. To the tenement woman President Wilson was the man who won the war, brought their sons back home, and stood for a continuation of Democratic conditions as existing during the war. Hundreds of tenement women gave me three reasons why they wished Mr. McAdoo in the White House. The first was always because he was the President’s son-in-law—as Mr. Wilson couldn’t have a third term they thought “they” ought to send his daughter’s husband. Their two other reasons were: he had started the raise in wages, and had been the means of lowering the price of coal. After the nominations, when my talk with tenement women turned to politics, I used to ask for an opinion of the nominees. Speaking of the man chosen by the Democrats they would reply: “Seems like they might’ve done better’n get a man who’d divorced the mother of his children. Don’t look right to me.” Political parties, take notice! The tenement woman has a vote. CHAPTER XX A PEST-HOUSE? In a preceding chapter I stated my conviction that in the district I covered as inspector of dog licenses there were representatives from every nationality on the globe. Now there are a considerable number of nationalities on the globe. Start to count and one will find the fingers of both hands used up hardly before the enumeration is well begun. In spite of the self-evidence of this fact, persons proclaiming themselves as interested in “our immigration problem” are continually asking me: “What do _you_ think about our immigration problem? You’ve lived in the tenements and seen things first-hand. _Which_ nationality do you think we should let in, and which shut out?” They speak so eagerly, are so confident of my ability to answer intelligently such simple questions. Simple questions! Though I consider my district a fair slice of New York, I know that New York now contains only a small portion of the foreign riffraff that has been deluging the country for the past forty years. As I saw conditions in the slums of New York, the United States has no immigration problem. Its immigration problem ceased to exist twenty years ago—it became an emergency. It is all very well to talk about the United States as an asylum for the oppressed peoples of the earth. That is a beautiful thought. But the asylum that admits every applicant, regardless of his or her mental or physical condition, soon becomes a pest-house.