The conferences and discussions on unemployment are an admission, however belated, that a society which has, in the interests of the privileged classes, permitted the exploitation of the worker, must face the consequences, bear some of the burden, and do its share towards preventing the continuance of the evil.  We do not cure smallpox by punishing the patient, nor do we thus prevent its recurrence among others.  We handle the disease both by treating the sick person himself, and by finding the causes that lead to its spread, and arresting these.  Industrial eruptive diseases have to be dealt with in like fashion, the cause sought for, and the social remedy applied fearlessly.

V

THE IMMIGRANT WOMAN AND ORGANIZATION

The melting-pot of the races is also the melting-pot of nationalities.  The drama that we are witnessing in America is a drama on a more tremendous scale than can ever have been staged in the world before.

By the unawakened and so-called pure American the incoming Italian or Jew is regarded as an outsider, who may be graciously permitted to hew wood and draw water, to forge steel in a rolling-mill or to sew in a factory, to cut ice or make roads for the rest of us, and who may, on the other hand, be given the cold shoulder more or less politely, generally less, when it comes to acquaintanceship, to the simple democratic social intercourse which we share with those whom we admit as our equals.

I, too, am an immigrant, although an English-speaking and Anglo-Saxon immigrant.  Therefore I am accepted among Americans as one of themselves.  But there comes to me often a bitter sense of separation from my fellow-immigrants, a separation by not one wall, but many.  First, the wall we none of us can help, the wall raised by difference of language.  Next, the wall raised by different manners and customs.  This we might try to scale oftener than we do.  Again, there are separating walls, harder than these either to surmount or to lay low, walls of provincial arrogance and crass self-satisfaction, and the racial pride that is mostly another name for primitive ignorance.

An ordinary city-dwelling American or an English-speaking foreigner earning a living in business or in one of the professions or even in some of the skilled trades might live a lifetime in the United States and never meet non-Americanized foreigners socially at all.  In church or club or on the footing of private entertainment these first-comers and their friends keep themselves to themselves.  And although among us such race-defined limits are less hard and fast than, say, the lines of class in old European countries, still there they are.  The less enlightened do not even think about the immigrant within our shores at all.  Those somewhat more advanced will talk glibly about the Americanization of the foreigner that is going on all the time.  So is it.  That is true, but the point here to be noted is that the desirable and inevitable process of the Americanization of the foreigner, and his assimilation by and into the American nation takes place outside the charmed circles wherein these good respectable folks dwell; takes place in spite of their indifference; takes place without their active assistance, without their cooeperation, save and except so far as that cooeperation is unconscious and unavoidable.