The next and necessary evil consequent upon this exaltation of the individual and private property over the State, over the race that is and over public property, has been a contempt for public service.  It has identified public spirit with spasmodic acts of public beneficence.  The American political ideal became a Cincinnatus whom nobody sent for and who therefore never left his plough.  There has ensued a corrupt and undignified political life, speaking claptrap, dark with violence, illiterate and void of statesmanship or science, forbidding any healthy social development through public organisation at home, and every year that the increasing facilities of communication draw the alien nations closer, deepening the risks of needless and disastrous wars abroad.

And in the third place it is to be remarked that the American tradition has defeated its dearest aims of a universal freedom and a practical equality.  The economic process of the last half-century, so far as America is concerned has completely justified the generalisations of Marx.  There has been a steady concentration of wealth and of the reality as distinguished from the forms of power in the hands of a small energetic minority, and a steady approximation of the condition of the mass of the citizens to that of the so-called proletariat of the European communities.  The tradition of individual freedom and equality is, in fact, in process of destroying the realities of freedom and equality out of which it rose.  Instead of the six hundred thousand families of the year 1790, all at about the same level of property and, excepting the peculiar condition of seven hundred thousand blacks, with scarcely anyone in the position of a hireling, we have now as the most striking, though by no means the most important, fact in American social life a frothy confusion of millionaires’ families, just as wasteful, foolish and vicious as irresponsible human beings with unlimited resources have always shown themselves to be.  And, concurrently with the appearance of these concentrations of great wealth, we have appearing also poverty, poverty of a degree that was quite unknown in the United States for the first century of their career as an independent nation.  In the last few decades slums as frightful as any in Europe have appeared with terrible rapidity, and there has been a development of the viler side of industrialism, of sweating and base employment of the most ominous kind.

In Mr. Robert Hunter’s “Poverty” one reads of “not less than eighty thousand children, most of whom are little girls, at present employed in the textile mills of this country.  In the South there are now six times as many children at work as there were twenty years ago.  Child labour is increasing yearly in that section of the country.  Each year more little ones are brought in from the fields and hills to live in the degrading and demoralising atmosphere of the mill towns....”

Children are deliberately imported by the Italians.  I gathered from Commissioner Watchorn at Ellis Island that the proportion of little nephews and nieces, friends’ sons and so forth brought in by them is peculiarly high, and I heard him try and condemn a doubtful case.  It was a particularly unattractive Italian in charge of a dull-eyed little boy of no ascertainable relationship....