"Open wide our gates and set him on his way to happiness" says Mary Antin. Sixty thousand illiterate women were admitted in 1911 to this country. The president of The Woman's National Industrial League says in this connection to the House Committee: "Syndicates exist in New York and Boston for the purpose of supplying fresh young girls from immigrants arriving in this country for houses of ill fame. Immigrants arriving in New York furnish twenty thousand victims annually." Mr. Jacob Riis said very recently: "Scarce a Greek comes here, man or boy, who is not under contract. A hundred dollars a year is the price, so it is said by those who know, though the padrone's cunning has put the legal proof beyond their reach." But these are statistics, and Mary Antin is horrified by statistics except when she can prove that "the average immigrant family of the new period is represented by an ascending curve. The descending curves are furnished by degenerate families of what was once prime American stock." The "happiness" that those who knock at our gates run into once they land in our mines, factories, sweatshops, department stores, etc., might be traced further. The real question is this: Is immigration good for the immigrant? In view of the above facts there is but one answer so far as the illiterate and physically weak are concerned. Twisting of facts out of a desire to reach certain conclusions will only harm the immigrant and the inhabitants of this country. Mary Antin would have been Mary Antin in Russia, Turkey, or Aphganistan. The weak and the illiterate are the ones who keep this question in the foreground. Probably the only exception is the Russian Jew. He has no country of his own and the New York East Side is a comparative improvement over the Czar's empire. WILLIAM SAPHIER. [Footnote 2: Fifth Report of Tenement House Department, 1909. Page 102.] [Footnote 3: Ernest Poole:--A Handbook on the Prevention of Tuberculosis.] The Unique James Family Notes of a Son and Brother, by Henry James. [Charles Scribner's Sons, New York.] Whatever the deprecators of Henry James's later manner may have to say about the difficulties of his involved style there are some situations, some plots, for which it is most happily suited. Was so haunting a ghost story ever written as that truly horrible one which involved two children--the name of which has unfortunately escaped me, for I should like to recommend it for nocturnal perusal. And in The Golden Bowl the gradual way you are led to perceive the wrong relationship between two of the characters, which, had it been offered bluntly, with no five degrees of approach and insinuation, would have lost half its mystery of guilt. As he himself says, in the Notes of a Son and Brother, "I like ambiguities, and detest great glares."