How far a certain cosmopolitan humanitarianism ignoring national differences, is either possible or desirable, it is difficult to state; but certain it is that the old type of patriotism, founded upon a common national history and land occupation, becomes to many of the immigrants who bring it with them a veritable stumbling-block and impediment. Many Greeks whom I know are fairly besotted with a consciousness of their national importance, and the achievements of their glorious past. Among them the usual effort to found a new patriotism upon American history is often an absurd undertaking; for instance, on the night of one Thanksgiving Day, I spent some time and zeal in a description of the Pilgrim Fathers, and the motives which had driven them across the sea, while the experiences of the Plymouth colony were illustrated by stereopticon slides and little dramatic scenes. The audience of Greeks listened respectfully, although I was uneasily conscious of the somewhat feeble attempt to boast of Anglo-Saxon achievement in hardihood and privation, to men whose powers of admiration were absorbed in their Greek background of philosophy and beauty. At any rate, after the lecture was over, one of the Greeks said to me, quite simply, “I wish I could describe my ancestors to you; they were very different from yours.” His further remarks were translated by a little Irish boy of eleven, who speaks modern Greek with facility and turns many an honest penny by translating, into the somewhat pert statement: “He says if _that_ is what your ancestors are like, that his could beat them out.” It is a good illustration of our faculty for ignoring the past, and of our failure to understand the immigrant’s estimation of ourselves. This lack of a more cosmopolitan standard, of a consciousness of kind founded upon creative imagination and historic knowledge is apparent in many directions, and cruelly widens the gulf between immigrant fathers and their children who are “Americans in process.” A hideous story comes from New York of a young Russian Jewess who was employed as a stenographer in a down-town office, where she became engaged to be married to a young man of Jewish-American parentage. She felt keenly the difference between him and her newly immigrated parents, and on the night when he was to be presented to them she went home early to make every possible preparation for his coming. Her efforts to make the _ménage_ presentable were so discouraging, the whole situation filled her with such chagrin, that an hour before his expected arrival, she ended her life. Although the father was a Talmud scholar of standing in his native Russian town, and the lover was a clerk of very superficial attainments, she possessed no standard by which to judge the two men. This lack of standard must be charged to the entire community; for why should we expect an untrained girl to be able to do for herself what the community so pitifully fails to accomplish?