We have not had a vision of many peoples making one nation, but rather of a few people being worked for by others. Even kindhearted employers with “welfare departments” for their men have little realization of their immigrant workmen as future American people. In many cases the welfare provisions and company housing specifically _do not apply_ to the immigrant force. The average American housewife does not think of the immigrant and her future in America when she needs a servant, but wonders what nationality will suit her best. I should like to ask how many of our housewives, even our suffragist housewives, know the attitude of their foreign-born servants towards America or how well they are fitted for citizenship? Are they regarded as a civic factor of any importance? The average American officer regards the immigrant as a trouble-maker; but how many cities compile their laws intelligently in a language the immigrant can read, so that he may not become one? It is the native-born American who must separate the wheat from the chaff before we can estimate the wheat and dispose of the chaff. We cannot treat the immigrant as if he were something to be absorbed, automatically, by inevitable chemical reaction, in the course of time. He is a living, changing, creative organism, _needing attention at every minute, and with something to contribute at every point_. From the moment he arrives in America he needs the _creative_, aggressive attention of American institutions if he is to become a good American. What he gets, when he gets anything, is a chance to touch here and there American institutions adapted to a native-born population and _barely fulfilling the needs of the native born_. Take the case of the immigrant who arrives at Ellis Island and goes, let us say, to a New England mill town. Originally it was a conservative little colonial town of 1000 population with no large industries, and with schools, churches, and a library adapted to the population. The introduction of several factories increases the population fourfold, and 75 per cent of the newcomers are foreign born, needing especially to profit by the organized institutions of America. But what really happens is that the institutions adapted to the original 1000 native Americans remain exactly the same--schools, churches, library, court, and houses, for the host of new Americans to fit into them as best they can. In other words, although immigrants may make up from one half to two thirds of that town they do not figure 10 per cent in its activities or 10 per cent in its government or its facilities.