The indifference and ignorance of the native-born voter are real impediments to Americanism. A vote is a practical thing requiring as much knowledge and experience in its use as any other responsible act of life. You cannot teach a man to handle a gun by a series of lectures on the ethics of warfare. Neither can you teach a man to handle a vote by the average treatise on civil government. In our failure to find this training in the public school, we turn next to the political school, the club, the district organization. Here we find every mechanism possible for getting the vote and holding it, but practically none for training or instructing that vote. It is easy to find a dozen men to help a prospective voter to obtain his citizenship papers, but very difficult to find one man or an institution to educate him in Americanism and English, enabling him to qualify. It is easy to find men who condemn the sinking of the _Lusitania_ and watchful waiting in Mexico, but hard to find a man who has a clear, practical idea of how he will register that protest in November. Thousands will vote for Mr. Roosevelt as their protest in case he is nominated. But suppose Mr. Roosevelt is not nominated. Have they thought of their next effective protest at the polls? Justice Hughes perhaps. But who knows where he stands on these questions? Those of us who have worked with him as governor of New York, and knew him, take no risks, but how about the average voter who has no such knowledge and must make up his own mind? As shown in the preceding chapter the acquiring of citizenship by aliens does not have for its main object the vote. To him, it is connected more closely with a job, with getting on in America, with freedom from the tyranny of his own country and from military service, and with gain. The power of the vote is, generally speaking, an unknown quantity to him, until he has been here some time--often it represents something which he can sell, or which he has to have to keep his job--ideals set before him by some native American. It is a rather curious thing that the padrone system had its real origin in our political rather than in our industrial system. The padrone is a labor boss who furnishes men to industrial organizations, and in return for keeping up the supply of men, has the privilege of housing and feeding them--making his profit from the employment fees, housing, and supplies. The padrone, however, is usually a political leader, not in the camp or quarry or mine where the industry is located, but in the city, which is the source of the supply of men. It was generally understood that the padrone, in return for the contract to furnish men, would deliver the foreign-born vote in his district in favor of the candidate acceptable to the company with whom he had contracted. He saw to it that his countrymen were naturalized and how they voted. In this way the position of the padrone became impregnable.