envelope has made a poor melting pot, and America is to-day paying the cost of an experiment that has failed. Whenever we have established lines that make our native Americans inaccessible to our foreign-born residents, there we have established the unknown quantity in fixing the responsibility for the immigrant standard of living, without which knowledge the truth can never be ascertained. What I am urging is this: Before we assert so calmly that the immigrant lowers the American standard of living let us rest our case with the man higher up--if need be with the financier who supplies the capital and requires that all material conditions must be right, but who forgets that in the last analysis the success of any enterprise depends upon loyal, efficient workmen with a home stake in America. Another native-American illusion is that the immigrant will not appreciate our efforts. Since when has America based its principles of action upon the flimsy desire for appreciation? Furthermore we expect the appreciation to be out of all proportion to what we do. We have indeed deteriorated when we have come to regard simple acts of justice, fair play, service, obligation, and duty as acts to be persisted in only when the immigrant is duly appreciative! Such a stimulus would have done little to develop the northwest and to conquer the resources of the country. The man who hesitates to build houses for his homeless or commuting workmen because it may be paternalism, closes the club-house he has provided because it is not appreciated, or bewails his empty playground as a species of rank ingratitude. A great weakness of the American character to-day is its desire for appreciation and credit, and it does not make for Americanism. A third American illusion is that the native American always thinks of the immigrants as getting something from America--wages or liberty or opportunity or rights. We forget that the majority of them come to us as laborers, representing a net contribution of at least $1000, which is the cost of raising a native-born child to the productive age. In these days of prosperity, of new vision in business, of expansion marked by a remarkable greatness of spirit, it is no time to forget that the very industries which are at present by way of putting America in the front ranks of trade and commerce are dependent upon immigrant labor.