│ │Father’s 4│Sickness of 5 │ │ desertion of │ child while at │ │ family │ school │ │Father’s 4│Father’s 2 │ │ intemperance │ laziness │ │Father in prison 1│Not determined 25 ───────────┼───────────────────┼───────────────────┼─────────────────── Total, 213.│ │Total, 105 = 49.30%│Total, 108 = 50.70% ═══════════╧═══════════════════╧═══════════════════╧═══════════════════ I do not offer this table as conclusive testimony upon the point under discussion. The number of cases investigated is too small to give the results more than suggestive value. Personally, I believe that the cases given are fairly typical, and that is the opinion also of some of the leading authorities upon the subject to whom I have submitted the table. No private investigator can ever hope to investigate a sufficient number of cases to establish anything conclusively in this connection. What is needed most of all is a coöperative investigation under the direction of the leading sociological students of the country until such extensive returns are gathered as will justify more positive conclusions. In the meantime such tables as this can at best only serve to call attention to what _may_ be a general fact. The table shows more than mere poverty. First of all there is the senseless, feverish, natural ambition of the immigrant to save money, to be rich. “Ma boy getta much mona—I get richa man,” said one of the Italians included in the first line of the fourth column of the foregoing table. How often I have heard that speech! Not always in the broken music of Italian-English, but in the many-toned, curious English of Bohemian, Lithuanian, Scandinavian, Russian, Pole, and Greek—all drawn by the same powerful magnet of wealth—all sacrificing, ignorantly and blindly, the lives of themselves and their children in their fevered quest. In this, as in so many other problems of the republic, the immigration of hundreds of thousands of people of alien races, customs, and speech enters. Whether their admission is wise or unwise is a subject outside the scope of this discussion, but one thing is certain, and as vital as it is true, namely, that hospitality has its obligations and duties. If the nation is to receive these immigrants, the nation must accept the responsibility of protecting them and itself. It must protect the immigrants from the dangers which their ignorance does not permit them to see, and protect itself from having to bear in the near future an Atlantean load; an economic burden which must come to it if these “strangers within the gates” in their ignorance are allowed to barter the manhood of their sons and the womanhood of their daughters for gold.