"Come over here quick, Luigi," writes an Italian to his friend in Palermo. "This is a wonderful country. You can do anything you want to, and, besides, they give you a vote you can get two dollars for!" This Italian was an ignorant man, but not necessarily a bad man. It would not be just to look upon the later naturalized citizens as caring less for the suffrage than the older immigrants. Some of them appreciate the ballot all the more from having been denied it in the old country. For the Declaration of Independence and the Fourth of July they show a naïve enthusiasm which we Americans felt a generation ago, before our muck had been raked. "The spirit of revolt against wrong," says a well-known worker among immigrants, "is stronger in the foreign-born than in the natives, because they come here expecting so much democracy, and they are shocked by the reality they find. It is they who insist upon the complete program of social justice." Granting all this, there is no denying, however, that many of the later immigrants have only a dim understanding of what the ballot means and how it may be used. [Illustration: Photograph by Lodder A Civic Banquet to "New Citizens," July 4th] Thirty years ago we knew as little of the ways of the ward boss as we knew of the megatherium or the great auk. The sources of his power were as mysterious as were the sources of the Nile before Speke and Baker. Now, thanks to Miss Addams and other settlement-workers who have studied him in action from close at hand, we have him on a film. The ward boss was the discoverer of the fact that the ordinary immigrant is a very poor, ignorant, and helpless man, in the greatest need of assistance and protection. Nevertheless, this man has, or soon will have, one thing the politician greatly covets, namely, a vote. The petty politician soon learned that by befriending and aiding the foreigners at the right time, he could build up an "influence" which he might use or sell to his own enrichment. So the ward politicians became pioneers in social work. For the sake of controlling votes, they did many things that the social settlement does for nothing. It is Alderman Tim who gets the Italian a permit for his push-cart or fruit-stand, who finds him a city-hall job, or a place with a public-service corporation, who protects him if he violates law or ordinance in running his business, who goes his bail if he is arrested, and "fixes things" with the police judge or the state's attorney when he comes to trial. Even before Giuseppe is naturalized, it is Tim who remembers him at Christmas with a big turkey, pays his rent at a pinch, or wins his undying gratitude by saving his baby from a pauper burial or sending carriages and flowers to the funeral.