and customs, they shared two disadvantageous conditions:  industrially they were oppressed, and socially they were subject races.  Therefore they were one people, in spite of their nine nationalities.  These two conditions acted and reacted upon one another complicating and intensifying the struggle.  But because of this very intensity it has been easier for the onlooker to separate out the real questions at issue, easier for the sympathetic American to come into wholesome and human relationship with this large body of his brothers and sisters.  To him they could be one group, for their interests were one, and they had been too long separated from him and from one another by the accidents of birth and speech.

So the searchlight turned on then on the sewing trades has since cast its enlightening beams on industrial conditions in other trades, in which, too, one race is perpetually played off against another with the unfailing result of cuts in wages and lowering of standards of living.

All tests of admission to secure some measure of selection among new arrivals are but experiments in an untried field.  We have no tests but rough-and-ready ones, and even these are often inconsistent with one another.  For instance, for a good many years now the immigration inspectors have taken such precautions as they could against the admission of the insane, but it is only recently that modified Binet tests have been used to check the entry of a socially far more injurious class, the congenitally feebleminded.

Those who have worked extensively among newly arrived foreign girls find that they arrive here with, as a rule, much less idea of what awaits them, what will be expected of them, and the difficulties and even dangers they may encounter, than the men.  When the Chicago Women’s Trade Union League began its immigration department a few years ago, it was found that three dollars was about the average sum which a girl had in her pocket when she reached the city of her destination.  Ten dollars was felt to be a fortune, while I have since heard of young girls landing alone in a great city, and without a single cent with which to leave the depot.  It is often said, why do their mothers let them go away (sixteen and eighteen are common ages) so young, so inexperienced?  It must be remembered that many of the Polish and Lithuanian girls, for example, come from small villages.  The mothers themselves have never seen a big city, and have not the remotest conception of any place of more than five hundred inhabitants, where the distances are short, and where everyone knows everyone else.  They have no idea of the value of money, when it comes to earning and spending it in America.  Three dollars a week is to mother, as to daughter, an ample sum for the young traveler.

It often happens that many of the young immigrants have had letters from those who had preceded them.  But we know what human nature is.  The person who succeeds proudly writes home the good news.  The still more successful person is able to take a trip home and display the visible signs of his or her wealth.  The unsuccessful, as a rule, either does not write at all, or writing, does not admit the humiliating truth.