Shaking the Declaration of Independence in the face of all those opposed to immigration in any form Mary Antin makes an impassioned appeal for practically unrestricted immigration. Her motive is no doubt praiseworthy, her enthusiasm and eloquence are admirable. She contrasts the nature of our present-day immigrants with those who landed in the Mayflower. The self-satisfied middle class attitude peeps through the question: "Is immigration good for us?" And of course it is good. The immigrants do more than three-quarters of our bituminous coal mining. They make seven-tenths of our steel. They do four-fifths of our woolen, nine-tenths of our cotton-mill work, nearly all our clothing, nearly all our sugar, eighty-five per cent of all labor in the stock-yards. You cannot but come to the same conclusions as Mary Antin: "Open wide our gates and set him on his way to happiness." On his way to happiness? One thinks of Lawrence, Massachusetts, where immigrants are not exactly happy; or Paterson, New Jersey; or an incident of this kind from Marysville, California, related by Inez Haynes Gillmore in Harper's Weekly for April 4: "An English lad, the possessor of a beautiful tenor voice, song leader of the hop pickers, was walking along carrying a bucket of water. A deputy sheriff shot him down." One thinks of the Michigan copper mines. Alexander Irvine told us something about peonage in the South in his "Magyar." The New York East Side with its 364,367[2] dark rooms and its "lung block with nearly four thousand people, some four hundred of whom are babies. In the past nine years alone this block has reported two hundred and sixty-five cases of tuberculosis."[3] In Pittsburgh alone, according to The Literary Digest of January 16, 1909, five hundred laborers are killed and an unknown number injured every year in the steel industry. According to Dr. Peter Roberts about eighty per cent of those suffering from rickets in Chicago are Italians, Greeks, and Syrians. This disease is almost unknown in the southern countries. The following is taken from an article by Henry A. Atkinson in Harper's Weekly: The policy of the companies has been to exclude the more intelligent, capable English-speaking laborers by importing large numbers from southern Europe: Greeks, Slavonians, Bulgarians, Magyars, Montenegrins, Albanians, Turks as well as representatives from all of the Balkan states. The Labor Bureau charges the large corporations of the state with hiring these men--"because they can be handled and abused with impunity."... Louis Tikas is dead. His body riddled with fifty-one shots from rapid fire guns, lay uncared for twenty-four hours at Ludlow where he had been for seven months the respected chief of his Greek countrymen. He was shot while attempting to lead the women and children to a place of safety. At least six women and fifteen little children died with him.