Today these immigrants from the south of Europe have virtually displaced the miner from the north.  They have rooted out the decencies and comforts of the earlier operatives and have supplanted them with the promiscuity, the filth, and the low economic standards of the medieval peasant.  There are no more desolate and distressing places in America than the miserable mining “patches” clinging like lichens to the steep hill sides or secluded in the valleys of Pennsylvania In the bituminous fields conditions are no better.  In the town of Windber in western Pennsylvania, for example, some two thousand experienced English and American miners were engaged in opening the veins in 1897.  No sooner were the mines in operation than the south European began to drift in.  Today he outnumbers and underbids the American and the north European.  He lives in isolated sections, reeking with everything that keeps him a “foreigner” in the heart of America.  The coal regions of Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois and the ore regions of northern Michigan and Minnesota are rapidly passing under the same influence.

Every mining and manufacturing community is thus an ethnic pool, whence little streams of foreigners trickle over the land.  These isolated miners and tillers of the soil are more immune to American ideals than are their city dwelling brethren.  They are not jostled and shaken by other races; no mental contagion of democracy reaches them.

But within the towns and cities another process of replacement is going on.  Its index is written large in the signs over shops and stores and clearly in the lists of professional men in the city directories and in the pay roll of the public school teachers.  The unpronounceable Slavic combinations of consonants and polysyllabic Jewish patronymics are plentiful, while here and there an Italian name makes its appearance.  The second generation is arriving.  The sons and daughters are leaving the factory and the construction gang for the counter, the office, and the schoolroom.

American ideals and institutions have borne and can bear a great deal of foreign infiltration.  But can they withstand saturation?

CHAPTER XI

THE GUARDED DOOR

“Whosoever will may come” was the generous welcome which America extended to all the world for over a century.  Many alarms, indeed, there were and several well-defined movements to save America from the foreigner.  The first of these attempts resulted in the ill-fated Alien and Sedition laws of 1798, which extended to fourteen years the period of probation before a foreigner could be naturalized and which attempted to safeguard the Government against defamatory attacks.  The Jeffersonians, who came into power in 1801 largely upon the issue raised by this attempt to curtail free speech, made short shrift of this unpopular law and restored the term of residence