But the statesman shuts himself away from the possibility of using these great reservoirs of human ability and motive power because he considers it patriotic to hold to governmental lines and ideals laid down a century and a quarter ago. Because of a military inheritance, we as a nation stoutly contend that all this varied and suggestive life has nothing to do with government nor patriotism, and that we perform the full duty of American citizens when the provisions of the statutes on naturalization are carried out. In the meantime, in the interests of our theory that commercial and governmental powers should have no connection with each other, we carefully ignore the one million false naturalization papers in the United States issued and concealed by commercialized politics. Although we have an uneasy knowledge that these powers are curiously allied, we profess that the latter has no connection with the former and no control over it. We steadily refuse to recognize the fact that our age is swayed by industrial forces. Fortunately, life is much bigger and finer than our theories about it, and, among all the immigrants in the great cities, there is slowly developing the beginnings of self-government on the lines of their daily experiences. The man who really knows immigrants and undertakes to naturalize them, makes no pretense of the lack of connection between their desire to earn their daily bread and their citizenship. The petty and often corrupt politician who is first kind to immigrants, realizes perfectly well that the force pushing them to this country has been industrial need and that recognition of this need is legitimate. He follows the natural course of events when he promises to get the immigrant “a job,” for that is undoubtedly what the immigrant most needs in all the world. If the politician nearest to him were really interested in the immigrant and were to work out a scheme of naturalization fitted to the situation, the immigrant would proceed from the street-cleaning and sewer-digging in which he first engages, to an understanding of the relation of these simple offices to city government. Through them he would understand the obligation of his alderman to secure cleanliness for the streets in which his children play and for the tenement in which he lives. The notion of representative government could be made quite clear and concrete to him. He could demand his rights and use his vote in order to secure them. His very naïve demands might easily become a restraint, a purifying check upon the alderman, instead of a source of constant corruption and exploitation. But when the politician attempts to naturalize the bewildered immigrant, he must perforce accept the doctrinaire standard imposed by men who held a theory totally unattached to experience, and he must, therefore, begin with the remote Constitution of the United States. At the Cook County Court-House only a short time ago a candidate for naturalization, who was asked the