The one great assimilative agency, which is continually cited as the hope of the coming generation of the foreign-born, is the American public school. It certainly is a tremendous force in the right direction, and its possibilities are immeasurable. Yet even the public school is not a panacea for all ills. It cannot take the place of both birth and home training. During the hours that the pupils are in school, a wise and tactful teacher can instill many of the principles of Americanism into their minds. But the means, good as it is, is not adequate to the end. And it is to be feared that under recent conditions even the public schools are losing some of the power in this direction that they once had. With the growth of localized colonies of a single race, or of several foreign races, the schools in many of our large cities are losing their American character, as far as the pupils are concerned, so that the immigrant child finds himself associating with others equally foreign with himself, instead of with children from American families. There is a story that in a certain New England city, of high scholastic traditions, an American lady determined to place her son in the public school, and on taking him down found that he was the only American child in that school. A Russian Jewess edged up to her and remarked confidentially, “Ain’t it a shame, the way the Dagoes are crowding in everywhere these days?” Furthermore, a very large proportion of the children of the foreign-born do not receive even such Americanizing influence as the public school exerts, because of the religious prejudices which compel them to attend parochial schools. Aside from the characteristics of the immigrants themselves, the positive forces which prevent or retard assimilation may be considered under three heads, viz. the indifference, love of wealth, and race prejudice of the older residents of the United States. As to the first of these, no elaboration is required. The attitude of those who are perfectly content to let things drift along as they will, without any care on their part, is too familiar and too well understood to need comment. The love of wealth manifests itself as a barrier to assimilation, in two principal ways. First, the greed for economic gain results in bringing in continually cheaper supplies of labor, represented by ever lower and more backward races, and paying them such wages as of necessity keep them on the lowest scale of living. Secondly, the well-developed distinctions between the rich and the poor prevent Americans from associating on friendly terms with these same foreigners for whose presence and condition they are at least indirectly responsible. The growing tendency for certain occupations of the lower type to become the especial province of certain foreign races, as has been observed above, is continually accentuating these distinctions.