on, the saloons with their attendant temptations
to vice and crime, the fraudulent naturalization--these work together
upon the immigrant, for his undoing and thus to the detriment of the
nation. When we permit such an environment to exist, and practically
force the immigrant into it because we do not want him for a next-door
neighbor, we can hardly condemn him for forming foreign colonies which
maintain foreign customs and are impervious to American influences. It
has too long been the common practice to lay everything to the
foreigner. Would it not be fairer and more Christian to distribute the
blame, and assume that part of it which belongs to us. In the study of
the facts contained in this chapter, put yourself persistently in the
place of the immigrant, suddenly introduced into the conditions here
pictured, and ask yourself what you would probably be and become in like
circumstances.

[Sidenote: A Call for Reform]

How the other half lives is not the only mystery. How little the
so-called upper-ten know how the lower-ninety live. And how little you
and I, who are fortunate to count ourselves in the next upper-twenty,
perhaps, know how the under-seventy exist and think and do. If only the
more fortunate thirty per cent. knew of the exact conditions under which
a large proportion of men, women, and children carry on the pitiful
struggle for mere existence, there would be an irresistible demand for
betterment. Every Christian ought to know the wrongs of our
civilization, in order that he may help to right them. This glimpse
beneath the surface of the city should stir us out of comfortable
complacency and give birth in us to the impulse that leads to settlement
and city mission work, and to civic reform movements. The young men and
women of America must create a public sentiment that will demolish the
slums, and erect in their places model tenements; that will tear down
the rookeries, root out the saloons and dens of vice, and provide the
children with playgrounds and breathing space. And this work will be
directly in the line of Americanizing and evangelizing the immigrants,
for they are chiefly the occupants and victims of the tenements and the
slums.

[Sidenote: Vanishing Americanism]

New York is a city in America but is hardly an American city.
Nor is any other of our great cities, except perhaps Philadelphia.
Boston is an Irish city, Chicago is a German-Scandinavian-Polish
city, Saint Louis is a German city,