About 9,000,000 people in this country read foreign-language newspapers. Some of them are persons who read these papers largely from necessity while they are learning English, and some of them never intend to learn, and never do learn, English at all. An immigrant who arrives in this country without being able to speak English finds that it takes a considerable time to learn it--the length of time depending on the place he finds work in and the people he works with. Now in this period, long or short, which must elapse before the alien learns English, the foreign-language newspaper could be an invaluable Americanizing agent. But it cannot be so without the coöperation of the native press and native Americans. And that we have never given. Our big manufacturers advertise in thousands of these papers to sell goods. Otherwise we do not concern ourselves with them at all, except to regard _all_ with suspicion when we learn of the disloyalty of _one_. Many of the editors of these papers, themselves not Americanized in any complete sense, are making inadequate but persistent efforts to connect their people with American institutions to lead them to become Americans, real citizens of this republic. They get little help from us. The American press is increasingly proud of its position as one of the very greatest of our social institutions. It is run for labor, for capital, for society, for business, for the man in the street; but it is run very little for the foreign-born citizen or alien who against odds is trying to accomplish his own assimilation. Yet this is exactly the task in which the newspaper that considered his interests and his needs could help him most. The public library, especially in cities where public school branches are maintained, has a great opportunity to reach the adult immigrant in his own neighborhood, in community reading rooms, by providing newspapers, books in the native language, simple books about America, either in English or translated into the native tongue. Whenever public library facilities are extended to immigrants, there is ample testimony to the enthusiasm with which they are received. A few years ago the management of the New York City public library in a very interesting report gave some startling figures covering the patronage of the public libraries by the foreign born of New York City, showing that they were exceptionally eager and persistent readers, and of the more serious forms of literature--history, philosophy, science, and drama. In hundreds of industrial towns of the country the public library is a virtual mausoleum, a monument to culture, little used but “always there.” Whole sections of the town that have never found the way to the library, and who might not be made welcome if they did, are starving for some recreative interest, some sources of information which they could manage.