I well know that my readers and my auditors have often criticised my optimism, and especially the sympathetic note with which I approach this problem, regarding which they are always more skeptical the more remote they are from it. I have tried to modify my view of the problem by facing it in all its bearings; I have not shrunk from seeing the worst of it. In fact I know American cities best from that dark and clouded side. I know the Little Italies, the Ghettos, the Patches around the mines, the East Side of New York and the West Side of Chicago; although I have never been the full length of Fifth Avenue and have never seen the famous North Shore drive. I am familiar with penitentiaries, jails, police courts and even worse places; for I wanted to know to what depths these leaden souls can sink, and I fear that I have more anxiety as to their nativity than their destiny. Yet, having seen the worst of the bad, I never lost my faith in these lesser folk and my optimism remained unclouded. One fear alone assailed me; that what my critics said _to_ me and _of_ me was true. "He is an immigrant himself, and of course it is natural that he should see the brighter side of the problem." To me, that was the severest and most cutting criticism, just because I feared it might be true; yet I have honestly tried to see the darkest side of this question, both as it affected the immigrant and the country that received him. I have listened patiently to jeremiads of home mission secretaries about these "Godless foreigners." I have read the reports of Immigrant Commissions, and all the literature written the last few years upon this subject, and I am still optimistic, and disagree with much that I have heard and read. Many authors who have written regarding this question had no first-hand information about it. They knew neither the speech nor the genius of these new people; they had a fixed belief that all civilization, culture and virtue, belong to the north of Europe and that the east and southeast of that continent are its limbo; and they relied upon statistics, which at best are misleading, when used to estimate human conduct and human influences. Typical of this class of literature is a recent pamphlet upon the subject, which, judging from the excellent biography appended, must be based upon extensive reading; yet the author comes to this conclusion: "Assimilation in the twentieth century is a very different matter from assimilation in the nineteenth. In many respects, the new immigration is as bad as the old was good."[3]