Focused under the microscope of theoretical analysis, or viewed through the spectacles of common sense, the average immigrant of to-day still shows the markings of virtue that have distinguished the best Americans from the time of the landing at Plymouth to the opening of the Panama Canal. But popular judgment is seldom based on a study of the norm, especially in this age of the newspaper. The newspaper is devoted to the portrayal of the abnormal--the shining example and the horrible example; and most men think they have done justice when they have balanced the one against the other, leaving out of account entirely the great mass that lies between the two extremes. And even of the two extremes, it is the horrible example that is more frequently brought to the attention of the public. Half a dozen Italians draw knives in a brawl on a given evening, and the morning newspapers are full of the story. On the same evening hundreds of Italians were studying civics in the night schools, inquiring for classics at the public library, rehearsing for a historical pageant at the settlement--and not a word about them in the newspapers. One Jewish gangster makes more "copy" than a hundred Jewish boys and girls who win honors in college. So also it is the business of the police to record the fact that a Greek was arrested for peddling without a license, while it is nobody's business to report that a dozen other Greeks chipped in their spare change to pay his fine. The reader of newspapers is convinced that the foreigners as a whole are a violent, vicious, lawless crowd, and the fewer we have of them the better. Could the annual reports of libraries and settlements be circulated as widely as the newspapers, the American public would not be guilty of such errors of judgment. But who reads annual reports? The very name of them is forbidding! It becomes necessary, therefore, to explain the newspaper types that jump to the fore in every discussion of the immigrant. First of all we must get a good grip on our sense of proportion. To speak of the immigrants as undesirable because a few of them throw bombs or live by gambling is about as fair as it would be for the world to call us Americans a nation of dissolute millionaires and industrial pirates because a Harry Thaw drank himself into an insane asylum and a Rockefeller swept a host of competitors to ruin. But the bomb-thrower and the gambler are extremely undesirable. Look at the Black Hand outrages, look at the Rosenthal case!