“Why, Miss Swainson, he don’t mind. Everybody always laughs at those Lescinszkies, and they don’t care. If they ever showed fight like Americans I guess we’d let them alone, but they don’t. They’re not like us.” “That’s just why you should treat them better. They haven’t learned that a boy has to fight in order to be decently treated,” Miss Swainson returned with fine scorn. “No, ma’am. If they could only learn that, they’d be all right.” Fine scorn was wasted on Charlie. All Miss Swainson’s efforts ended in this way. Secure in their feeling that traditional American means for securing respect were the only ones, smug with the provincialism of the small town, the school children continued to express to the alien boy the contempt they had imbibed from their elders. They merely smiled at Miss Swainson’s indignant efforts to win justice and kindness for their Polish schoolmate. Toward the end of the year the young teacher thought she detected a shade of difference in the treatment given Joseph. This was due partly to her constant shaming of the thoughtless cruelty of their conduct, and partly to the respect he himself won by his good work in the classroom. But although this small degree of success comforted her somewhat, she felt still the defeat of her efforts keenly, not realizing that a change of conduct based on imitation must come through a change of example followed. COMMENTS Miss Swainson’s method did not go deep enough. Mere protest will occasionally effect a change, but not often. If she could have gotten behind Charlie Owen’s attitude, and found its roots, which were probably in the attitude of some member of his family or a powerful older friend, she might have truly converted Charlie to her way of thinking. His statement that “everybody always laughs at those Lescinszkies,” might have given her a clue, but she did not realize that she was only working on the surface. ILLUSTRATION (RURAL SCHOOL) Sallie Lou Pinkston came from Mobile, Alabama, to the small, northern town of Cade Mills, when she was ten years old. She was the only girl in an adoring family of brothers—a lovely, sunny-haired child, with the confidence in her right to rule her world which her happy family life had given her. She entered the fifth grade that fall, and scored an immediate success with the whole room, teacher included. Her southern accent was a continual source of delight; her matter-of-course assumption that everyone wanted to do the entertaining things she planned kept the whole room, with two exceptions, tied to her dainty apron-strings.