While millions of women are being drawn from the home into industry, the popular ideal of womanhood serves as a precious safeguard, turning them away from coarsening occupations which might rob them of health or youth or refinement. But this ideal, which is higher among the American working-men than among the workers of any other people, is menaced by the new immigrants, with their peasant notions of womanhood. The Slavs and the Italians are not in the least queasy about putting their women into heavy and dirty work, such as core-making, glass-grinding, and hide-scraping, which self-respecting American girls will not touch. The employer realizes this, and continually tries these women in male occupations, with the object of substituting them for men, beating down men's wages or breaking a men's strike. Engaging in such masculine work not only prevents immigrant women from rising to the American woman's sense of self-respect, but it hinders their men from developing the American man's spirit of chivalry. What is more, the extension of woman's sphere on the wrong side underlines the native standard of womanliness, so that native girls are perhaps being drawn into work that denies them refinement and romance. WHAT BECOMES OF DISPLACED AMERICANS Does the man the immigrant displaces rise or sink? The theory that the immigrant pushes him up is not without some color of truth. In Cleveland the American, German, and Bohemian iron-mill workers displaced within the last fifteen years seem to have been reabsorbed into other growing industries. They are engineers and firemen, bricklayers, carpenters, slaters, structural iron-workers, steam-fitters, plumbers and printers. Leaving pick and wheelbarrow to Italian and Slav, the Irish are now meter-readers, wire-stringers, conductors, motormen, porters, janitors, caretakers, night-watchmen, and elevator-men. I find no sign that either the displaced workman or his sons have suffered from the advent of Pole and Magyar. Some may have migrated, but certainly those left have easier work and better pay. It is as though the alien tide had passed beneath them and lifted them up. On the other hand, in Pittsburgh and vicinity the new immigration has been like a flood sweeping away the jobs, homes, and standards of great numbers, and obliging them to save themselves by accepting poorer occupations or fleeing to the West. The cause of the difference is that Pittsburgh held to the basic industries, while in Cleveland numerous high-grade manufactures started up which absorbed the displaced workmen into the upper part of their labor force. OUR STANDARD OF LIVING CRUMBLES