Women labor union members; Women labor union members -- United States
On the other hand, Mr. Edward B. Whitney in his Memorandum appended to
the Report of the Commission of the State of New York argues thus
in discussing the claim made by the majority of the Commission that
certain special help and protection is needed by the alien. He asks
"whether, if a further extension of this kind of state charity is to
be made, it would not be better to take up something for the benefit
of our own citizens or for the benefit of citizen and alien alike."
Mr. Whitney is entirely logical. Only progress rarely takes place for
logical reasons, or on lines dictated by logic, but it does in
almost all cases follow the line of least resistance, and the wise
progressive accepts gratefully whatever he can get, without being too
anxious as to whether it seems to be logically the next step or not.
The immigrant has hitherto been used as an excuse to permit the
dehumanizing of our cities; he has been used industrially as an
instrument to make life harder for the hardly pressed classes of
workers whom he joined on his arrival here. That such has been his
sorry function has been his misfortune as well as theirs. Would it not
be equally natural and far more fair to utilize his presence among us
to raise our civic and economic and industrial standards? It is no
new story, this. Out of every social problem we can construct a
stepping-stone to something better and higher than was before. The
most that we know of health has been learned through a study of
the misadjustments that bring about disease. What has been done
educationally to assist the defective, the handicapped and the
dependent has thrown a flood of light upon the training of the normal
child. Through work undertaken in the first instance for the benefit
of the exceptions, the minority, the whole community has benefited.
In this connection no one will deny that immigrants, both men and
women, have their handicaps. In the great majority of instances they
are handicapped by an upbringing among primitive conditions, by their
unavoidable ignorance of our language and our customs, and by a quite
natural mental confusion as to our standards of conduct, to them
so curiously exacting in some respects as, for instance, where the
schooling of their children is concerned, so incomprehensibly lax in
others, say, in the unusual freedom accorded to those same children
when grown but a little older.
We shall find that whatever we do for the immigrant will be, in the
end, so much accomplished for the good of all. Let us lessen this
unfair pressure upon him, as far as we can, and we shall surely find
that in helping him to help himself, we have, at the same time,
benefited all workers.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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