These immigrant children, sitting side by side in the same school, will be received as guests in one another's homes. They will form those deep and lasting friendships which will make for true social unity. When we open our arms and our hearts to receive them and to give them all we have, it is they who reject us. They deny themselves the best gift we can possibly offer--a free public education. How often are we Americans made unhappy--sometimes, I fear, a bit displeased--when we see on one side of the street a beautiful, spacious and sanitary public-school building, and on the other side of the street a poorly constructed, insanitary and overcrowded parochial school. Our own children go to the public school. The immigrant children go to the parochial school. Our own children are taught by teachers carefully selected and trained for their service. In the overcrowded and insanitary parochial school the teaching is usually of a standard incomparably lower; often it is unworthy to be called education. Has the world ever presented a more curious and perplexing problem than we have here? We see American citizens of property and influence anxious to tax themselves in order to present to the child of the Sicilian, Hungarian, or Polish peasant the best common-school education in all the world. And then we see, to our unutterable amazement, this peasant serf, or city wastrel, misled by his clergy, rejecting the only worthy means we have of making Americans out of his children. To an average American this whole situation is both perplexing and distressing.