Of the many hundreds of immigrant communities which I have studied, I recall none in which American ideals were being aggressively menaced by immigrants who were determined to have none of them. Isolation, betrayal of our own minimum social and civic standards, these I have seen over and over again. But always the immigrant population has been the weaker force in any given community. There are in the country to-day hundreds of towns, say of 1500 population, in which the foreign born number one half. But in civic strength, social influence, and political power, the immigrant 50 per cent measures less than 10 per cent. In the census they appear as towns of 1500. In reality the native-born residents of these towns consider them as towns of about 500--with an unfortunate though necessarily large annex of immigrant workmen and their families who live “on the other side of the railroad” or in some other segregated spot--to which fire and water systems, garbage collections and calling do not penetrate. Now there can be no doubt that that large “annex” is a menace to the future of America. But it is a menace produced by American neglect, not by immigrant aggression and malevolence. We shall never solve the immigration problem so long as we begin with the immigrant’s shortcomings, nor shall we attain Americanism so long as we define it as nativism. We need not fear that we are not as much in control as we ever were. We set the standards. The question is whether we have cause to be satisfied with the way in which we do it. The ideals and standards of America are set by the American born to-day just as they were in our early history. In all communities which I have studied the American-born residents or employers are the determining factors. The citizen may send you through many devious channels, to see this boss and that boss, to win friends for your cause from this foreign-born leader or that immigrant saloon-keeper, but eventually you deal with a native American, not with an alien. Mr. Ross, in the “Old World in the New,” points to a typical Western town of 26,000 inhabitants, 10,000 of them immigrants, and gives a picture of the vice, intemperance, bad housing, and wretched standards of living resulting in this town from the immigrant population. We in America believe in majority rule. There was a safe margin of 6000 Americans in that town, free to establish and insist upon any standard they chose. Why were the Americans beaten in the struggle? Because here as in many places they ignored or definitely isolated the immigrants, permitting them to work all day with Americans at the mills or factories where they were needed, and then encouraging or compelling them to spend all the rest of their time in their own corner of the town, and to encroach no more than necessary upon the respectable streets and schools and churches and recreations of the American section.