The agitation for a literacy test rests upon two main groups of arguments. The first class includes the efforts to show that literacy, in itself, is a desirable qualification for citizenship, economically, socially, and politically. The second group rests on the belief that the total number of immigrants ought to be cut down, and that a literacy test is a good way to accomplish the result. It is not unlikely that this latter set of opinions predominated over the former in the minds of the adherents of the proposed measure, though it was not necessarily expressed openly. And there is much to be said in favor of the literacy test from this point of view. In the first place, it is a perfectly definite and comprehensible test, which could be applied by the immigrant to himself before he left his native village. In the second place, it is a test which any normal alien could prepare himself to meet if he were willing to make the effort. It does not seem too much to require of one who wishes to become a member of the American body politic, that he take the pains to equip himself with the rudiments of an education before presenting himself. Finally, as Miss Claghorn has pointed out,[164] it is a test which would react favorably upon the immigrant himself. It is impossible to tell, as noted above, just how much value attaches to literacy in the effort of the alien to maintain himself in this country. Yet without doubt there is some advantage. And perhaps there would be even more in the strengthening of character and purpose which would result from the effort to attain it. A glance at the preceding table will show which of the immigrant races, as the immigration stream is now constituted, would be most affected by such a test. But it is not at all impossible that the passage of a literacy test by this government would have the effect of materially stimulating the progress of education in some of the more backward countries of Europe. This tendency to illiteracy on the part of immigrants is apparently well overcome in the second generation, for among the employees in manufacturing studied by the Immigration Commission the percentage of illiteracy was lower among the native-born descendants of foreign fathers than among the native-born of native fathers.[165] In the year 1910 information was collected for the first time in regard to the conjugal condition of immigrants. The figures on this point are summarized in the following table, which gives the percentages of each sex, in the different age groups, who are in the different classifications as to conjugal condition.