tenth of the children of native parents. The influence of residence
in America is shown by the fact that of the children of foreigners born
in this country the proportion of bread-winners is reduced to
one-seventh.[139]

But it is the community more than the school that gives the child his
actual working ideals and his habits and methods of life. And in a great
city, with its separation of classes, this community is the slums, with
its mingling of all races and the worst of the Americans. He sees and
knows surprisingly little of the America that his school-books describe.
The American churches, his American employers, are in other parts of the
city, and his Americanization is left to the school-teacher, the
policeman, and the politician, who generally are but one generation
before him from Europe. But on the farm he sees and knows all classes,
the best and the worst, and even where his parents strive to isolate
their community and to preserve the language and the methods of the old
country, only a generation or two are required for the surrounding
Americanism to permeate. Meanwhile healthful work, steady, industrious,
and thrifty habits, have made him capable of rising to the best that
his surroundings exemplify.

[Illustration: SLAVIC HOME MISSIONARIES (From _The Home Missionary_)]

Since the year 1900 the Immigration Bureau has not inquired as to the
religious faith of the immigrants. In that year, when the number
admitted was 361,000, one-fifth were Protestants, mainly from Great
Britain, the Scandinavian countries, Germany, and Finland. One-tenth
were Jews, 4 per cent were Greek Catholics, and 52 per cent were Roman
Catholics. With the shifting of the sources toward the east and south of
Europe the proportion of Catholic and Jewish faith has increased. During
this transition the Protestant churches of America have begun to awaken
to a serious problem confronting them. The three New England states
which have given their religion and political character to Northern and
Western states are themselves now predominantly Catholic. In all of the
Northern manufacturing and industrial states and in their great cities
the marvellous organization and discipline of the Roman Catholic Church
has carefully provided every precinct, ward, or district with chapels,
cathedrals, and priests even in advance of the inflow of population,
while the scattered forces of Protestantism overlap in some places and
overlook other places. Tw