“The Social and Religious Life of Italians in America,” by Enrico C. Sartorio, is written from the viewpoint of one who came as a foreigner to America when he was already a young man. It aims to show how a foreigner really feels. In the words of Dean George Hodges, who writes the Introduction to the book, it “is a timely revelation of the width and depth of a racial gulf which must first be bridged and then filled. His suggestions as to the accomplishing of this necessary work are definite and practical inferences from his own successful experience.” Mr. Sartorio studied at the Cambridge Episcopal Theological School and has since been successfully engaged in pastoral work in the city of Boston. PATRONIZING THE FOREIGNER Among certain people there still exists the old prejudice that there must be something the matter with a foreigner. Exclusiveness on one side, loneliness on the other, do not help to interpret American life in the right spirit to the foreigner. If educated Italians thus do not know the real America, you can easily imagine what the immigrant’s conception of America may be. My barber, who has been in this country twenty-eight years, was dumbfounded when I told him the other day that six people out of seven in America are Protestant. The poor fellow had gone about for twenty-eight years tipping his hat to every church, thinking that they were all Roman Catholic churches. I have found over and over again Italian couples living together in the belief that they were husband and wife, because they misunderstood American law. They had been told that in America a civil marriage was as valid as a religious one, so they went to the City Hall, and by going through the process of answering questions in taking out the marriage license, they thought they had been married and went happily home to live together as husband and wife. An Italian tried to explain to me the meaning of Thanksgiving Day. “You see,” he said, “the word explains itself, ‘Tacchins-giving Day’”; “tacchin” meaning turkey in Italian, it was, according to this man, the day on which Americans gave away turkeys. And what opportunity has an immigrant to know this country when he sees America only at its worst? Through the gum-chewing girls whom he meets in factories, through the hard-drinking and hard-swearing “boss” who orders him about, through the dubious type of youth whom he meets at the saloon and in the dance hall, through the descriptions given in Italian newspapers and by cheap orators he comes to know America. Add to that poor wages, quarters in the slums, policemen, car conductors and ushers who laugh at him when he asks for information, “bosses” who claim a fee for securing him a job, and the sweet names of “Dago” and “Guinea” by which the supposed American thinks himself entitled to call him, and you can imagine what a delightful feeling the average Italian has toward this country.