gers that enter our gates. People who have reached a certain age, varying in the case of different individuals, have become crystallized in their ideas to a certain degree. They love the land from which they have come. Perhaps they have simply followed their children here. They live in the past. The only way in which they can possibly be reached is through their children, by means of the new ideas that the children have conceived and carried home. These people form, as a whole, an unassimilable element wherever they congregate. Probably the best that can be done with these, who are of the first generation, is to render them harmless by a kind of parental care, and by directing their energies into useful lines of industry that will lead to their general prosperity and consequent contentment. The dignity of honest labor will in time. make them conscious of being integral parts of society; and a property interest will promote allegiance, prevent anarchy, and insure political assimilation.

But the younger generation and their descendants can be reached. Their eyes are clear, their tongues are flexible and willing, and their purposes are strong and fixed. At the present time illiteracy in the native-born American is decreasing, while in the foreign-born it is increasing a practically unavoidable condition because of the great proportion of ignorant adult immigration. This tends naturally to correction in the second generation, but the unfortunate influence is still traceable. Yet the measure of raw material has this encouraging showing: compared with the 900,000 of the foreign born element of school age, there are 12,400,000 of the second generation of school age. In Massachusetts alone twenty per cent of illiteracy in the foreign-born is offset by one per cent in the native-born: showing the immediate effect of our schools on the children of a deplorably ignorant class of

newcomers.

Education will solve every problem of our national life, even that of assimilating our foreign element. The ameliorating effects of general education would be evident in a decade in every manifestation of social life. Knowledge is light, and evil dies in the light. Ignorance is the mother of anarchy, poverty, and crime. The nation has a right to demand intelligence and virtue of every citizen, and to obtain these by force if necessary. Compulsory education we must have as a safeguard for our institutions. What other element of our country's progress is so important? In the language of the principles set forth by the National Educational Association, let me say that the progress and happiness of a people are in direct ratio to the universality of education. A free

people must be developed by free schools. History records that the stability of a nation depends upon the virtue and intelligence of the individuals composing it. The child has the same right to be protected by law from ignorance as from abuse, neglect, or hunger.

We have said that the younger generation of immigrants can be reached by education. But this education must be compulsory. For, while these people are usually thrifty they are often lacking in foresight; and the manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the telegraph company, and many others that employ help offer a thousand inducements here to the boy and girl to earn a dollar, even if it be at the risk of losing a chance of going to school. It is a strange fact that some of the foreigners whose country is known for the general, thorough education which it bestows upon all its children are those who are most inclined to reject all the inducements of our public-school system, and to allow, nay to urge, their children to stay away from school, that they may earn money at an age when they ought to be interested in books. And yet compulsory education in this country is to a great extent a far easier matter than it proves to be in European countries. no tuition fees; in many places free books and school supplies; all people treated alike; no distinction between the masses and the classes.

What does compulsory education carry with it? (1) The pupil's very association with intellectual and honorable men and women tends to inspire toward higher standards of living. The children soon find themselves in wider horizons of thought. (2) It brings children of all ranks together. They all feel that they belong to one and the same great family or nation. (3) It enables them to acquire a thorough knowledge of English, not the slangy English of the street, but good, idiomatic, grammatical English. (4) It gives the child an opportunity to get a knowledge of the country in which he lives, of the government under which he exists, and of the people of whom he is to be a part. He learns that while he needs the country, the country needs him too; that he is to be a sovereign limited in his powers by such laws only as he himself may help to create, and by such restrictions as modern civilization places upon him as being, upon the whole, for the good of all; that there is no one below him, and no one above him except those whom he may some day help to elect to attend to the business which his country demands.

We might be justified in diverging at this point a little from the main topic to show why a common language is such an important factor in giving to a people a feeling of kinship. Travellers who come in

contact with people of a foreign tongue know with what suspicion, distrust, or awe any one is regarded who speaks a language other than that indigenous to the land in which he travels. In our own country we can see the same inclination. People shrink from the stranger and his strange speech. It is said that European housemaids, when required to attend foreign guests, despise and scorn their foreign ways of acting, as much as American laborers look down upon Hungarian or Italian workmen. They do not understand one another. Mutual misunderstanding begets mutual dislike, which in turn produces hatred and distrust, thus preventing assimilation. The uneducated foreigner who lands upon our shores brings with him the fears and prejudices of his native land. Give him the English education of which he is in need, and he will be able to understand what is said to him and what is expected of him. Encourage him; make him feel that this is his home; and he will become a loyal citizen. All this can be done through the public schools.

To imagine that all foreigners, or even a large proportion of them, are anarchists is absurd. Anarchy is world-wide. It has no home to cherish, no permanent abode. It is an attempt to return to barbarism. The anarchist wants freedom only to abuse it, while the average immigrant longs for freedom in order to be free. Man in general wishes for liberty, and needs it; but he knows that it has its bounds. On a deserted isle he might do as he pleased. In a civilized country law must be observed. Law is.not only a restriction but a benefit as well.

To sum up, compulsory education will give to the foreigner a chance of obtaining a thorough understanding of the English language; a fair knowledge of our government, and of the means of governing himself; and last, but not least, it will make him feel that he is the peer of all if he conducts himself as a true American citizen. The city of New York provides educational facilities not only for pupils who come within the age required by the compulsory educational law, but also for people of any age. It has its primary schools, its grammar schools, its high schools, its City College for boys, and its Normal College for girls; and, besides, it has its Training School for teachers, its junior and senior evening schools, its evening high school, etc. And within this system it exerts a necessary paternalism; furnishing text-books and material without which education would be inaccessible to the masses. It lays special stress upon the teaching of the English language and of the nature of our institutions. So the schools become the real safeguards of national life. Without its free public schools New York would be helpless in dealing with its hundreds of thousands of foreign population. This

process of regeneration is slow; as slow, really, as the education of the young and the ignorant. It is possibly still imperfect, but I am convinced that it is the way. The results attained by the public schools in bringing the various elements of our population into such pleasant relations as to make them easily assimilable are so apparent in New York and in other cities and places where compulsory education is demanded by law, that I am forced to the conclusion that the most efficient, persistent, and constant power of assimilation in America is the free public school under a well-devised compulsory education law.

"America for Americans" is not an unjust demand. But is our inheritance so limited, is our hospitality so lacking, is our love of freedom so destitute of vigor that it is necessary to place an insurmountable barrier between the immigrant and our shores? Should we not be more in accord with the spirit of our forefathers, if industry and intelligence are to receive open-armed welcome? St. Ambrose said: "When I am at Rome, I do as they do at Rome." And we should be entirely justified if we were to say to the incoming alien when he arrives: "Thou shalt do as we do; in our land our language shall be thy language; our customs shall be thy customs." JOHN T. BUCHANAN.

THE YOUNG MAN WITH NOTHING BUT BRAINS.

WHAT are the chances for the young man "with nothing but brains"? Forty years ago no one would have thought of asking such a question. Why should any one ask it now? Is not the market for brains just as great at the opening of the twentieth century? Many will contend that the demand for brains and the market price for them have been immeasurably enhanced by our marvellous industrial development. Others declare with equal persistence that the young man with nothing but brains has no chance at all in this age of combinations. They note with apprehension the tendency of all business activity toward centralization. It is an age of trusts, in which manufacturing and commercial enterprises are conducted upon a colossal scale and the young man is crowded out.

Let us see about that. It strikes me that the young man with nothing but brains has an immense advantage over the young man with nothing but money. The young man who inherits a fortune in these times receives a legacy of trouble and worry unless it is securely invested against business hazards. It will put gray hairs on his head. The chances are that he has not had the training that would qualify him to handle it without losing it. He has been chasing the Greek verb or the "pig-skin" at college while his father has been running the business. His poor cranium is doubtless full of the classics; but he knows no more about his father's business than his father knows about the Odes of Horace.

The late Philip D. Armour once told me that he did not give his sons a dollar's worth of stock in his immense business until they had satisfied him that they could "make sausage." This was the great packer's homely way of saying that he did not take his sons into the firm until they had shown business capacity and industry. But not many rich men in this country follow the example set by the founder of the great house of Armour. The young man with nothing but brains has nothing to lose. What to do with a patrimony of $100,000 does not bother him or keep him awake at night. The young man with