That way of speaking is the fashion among workers of all sorts in the educational institutions where foreigners attend in numbers. Get a group of settlement people swapping anecdotes about their immigrant neighbors, and there is apt to develop an epidemic of moist eyes. Out of the fullness of their knowledge these social missionaries pay the tribute of respect and affection to the strangers among whom they toil. For they know them as we know our brothers and sisters, from living and working and rejoicing and sorrowing together. The testimony of everyday experience is borne out by the sudden revelations of catastrophic circumstances, as reported by a librarian from Dayton, Ohio. In Dayton they had branch libraries located in different parts of the city, not in separate library buildings, but in convenient shops or dwelling-houses, where they were left in the care of some responsible person in the neighborhood. After the recent flood,(4) when the panic was over and the people began to dig for their belongings underneath the accumulated slime and wreckage, the librarian tried to collect at the central library whatever was recovered of the scattered collection. Crumpled, mutilated, slimy with the filth of the disemboweled city, the books came back--all but one collection, which had been housed in the midst of the Hungarian quarter. These came back neatly packed, scraped clean of mud, their leaves smoothed, dried,--as presentable as loving care could make them. (4) March, 1913. If that was not a manifestation of pure idealism, then is human conduct void of symbolism, and our public squares are cumbered in vain with monuments erected in commemoration of human deeds. But we read men's souls in their actions, and we know that they who flock to the schools are the spiritual kindred of those who founded them; they who cherish a book are passing along the torch kindled by him who wrote it. They pay the highest tribute to an inventor who show the most eagerness to adopt his invention. The great New England invention of compulsory education is more eagerly appropriated by the majority of our immigrants than by native Americans of the corresponding level. That is what the school-teachers say, and I suppose they know. They also say,--they and all public educators in chorus,--that while one foreign nationality excels in the love of letters, another excels in the love of music, and a third in the love of science; and all of them together constitute an army whose feet keep time with the noble rhythms of culture.