“We commend this responsibility in all its phases to the various state departments charged with education, health, letting of contracts, payment of bills, supervision of highways and waterways, and protection of laborers. We ask the state as employer to consider its gain from the men at the most productive periods of their lives; we ask the state to measure the influence of this life upon its future citizens during their first years in the country when they are most receptive to impressions of America.”[22] Quite recently the Public Health Council of the New York State Department of Health has adopted a sanitary code for all labor camps. It is impossible to compute the sums that have been lost by immigrants through fake banks, fake express companies, and irresponsible steamship agencies. In New York State these were practically legislated out of existence through the efforts of the Commission of Immigration of 1909 just referred to, yet in the winter of 1914-15 approximately $12,000,000 was lost on the lower East Side by the failure of private banks, sweeping away the savings and capital of between 60,000 and 70,000 depositors. Happily, the postal savings bank has come, and is already much used by immigrants, incidentally keeping a large amount of money in this country. In important centers the stations might be socialized to the still greater advantage of the depositors and the service by having someone assigned to interpret, to write addresses and give information. These favors have been the bait held out to the timid stranger by the private agencies. [Illustration: A REGION OF OVERCROWDED HOMES] Perhaps an even greater loss has come to us through the land-sale deceptions. Farms cultivated in New York State are actually decreasing, while the population increases. The census of 1900-1910 shows 4.9 per cent. decrease of farms and 25.4 per cent. increase of population. Great numbers of the immigrants are peasants, and land-hungry, and if there was a policy throughout the states of registration of land for prospective settlers, and if severe penalties attached to land frauds, I have little doubt that valuable workers might be directed to the enormous areas that need cultivation. “I am an agriculturist,” said a man who found his way to the settlement to tell his troubles, “and I pull out nails in a box factory in New York.” His entire family have followed him to the land that he is now cultivating. One winter a number of peasants from the Baltic provinces found themselves stranded in New York. It was a period of unemployment, and they could find no work. Unaccustomed to cities, they eagerly seized upon an opportunity to leave New York. At the settlement, where they were assembled, a state official told them of wood-cutters needed—in Herkimer County, as I remember it. An advertisement called for forty men, and the responsibility of the advertiser was vouched for by the local banker.