Persecuted America! Miss Repplier, lamenting the immigrant invasion of Philadelphia, in the _Atlantic Monthly_ not long ago, presents a truly colonial point of view concerning the suffering wrought by the twentieth-century world of America in this colonial stronghold. In the mind of Miss Repplier and many thousands of Americans the long-suffering American, heir of all the ages, legatee of all the best traditions of liberty and opportunity sealed in 1776, is now driven like sheep before the advancing immigrant hordes: “Dirt is a valuable asset in the immigrant’s hands. With its help he drives away decent neighbors, and brings property down to his level and his purse. The ill-fated Philadelphian is literally pushed out of his home--the only place, sighs Mrs. Pennell, where he wants to live--by conditions that he is unable to avert, and unwilling, as well as unfitted, to endure.” Old Philadelphians that would never have run from an Indian, that would have conquered the forests and spanned the rivers, run from the Italian and the Pole. Alas! We too have deteriorated. We see nothing dramatic, we feel no challenge, in the fight to raise the standards of our less fortunate neighborhoods. We cannot find any inspiration in that ideal of justice which insists on law enforcement equally among all residents of a neighborhood. Is there nothing to be said on behalf of the neighborly, friendly visiting which would soon make dirt as unfashionable in the immigrant’s as in the Philadelphian’s home? The reason that the tenement fire escapes are cluttered in Rivington Street and free on Fifth Avenue is not, as we fondly suppose, that immigrants prefer fire escapes draped with bedding and pillows and children. The answer is that they move to Fifth Avenue as soon as their income permits and as fast as they learn how well it is possible to live in America. Let us take a town in the making and see if the standards do not come back to some native American. Take, for instance, the towns that have grown up during the war-order prosperity, which is typical of our town building in the past in America. American capital, directed by native-American enterprise and brains, selects a site and builds a model factory, secures the necessary transportation facilities and puts in its power and machines. Anything else? Yes, the skilled labor market is scarce of men, so a few good houses are put up for skilled workmen, upon whom the operation of the plant depends. As for the mass of foreign-born unskilled workmen, relying upon a well-stocked market, no provision is made for housing, sanitation, or other care of them. This is left to the individual workman and to the speculator. When a cluster of huts, tents, or bunk houses spring up, is it because the immigrant prefers the huts or tents, or is it because the only power to create standards--the native-American power--has ignored its obligation?