p contrasts as they are, these sketches fairly picture the heights and
depths of industrial conditions in a region which, as I would again remind
you, contains nearly one-half of all the factory operatives in America.
More than this, while the States in question would yield to no others
their claims to represent advanced civilization, Massachusetts, the
creation of the Puritan refugees, and the cradle of American independence,
stands confessedly at the head of all her sister States for enlightened
philanthropy. There are no greater lovers of right, honorers of industry,
and friends to education in the world than its people, yet the present
social condition of Holyoke and of Lowell, as of many other manufacturing
cities, would have shocked all America thirty years ago, and been
impossible less than half a century back. It is time we should ask, How is
America going to treat a problem, formerly the danger and still the
perplexity of Europe, for which democratic institutions have failed to
furnish the solution once confidently, but unfairly, expected from them?

The State, the Church, and the School are all doing their best to prevent
the lapse to lower conditions which seems to threaten labor in the States,
each of them trying their utmost to "make Americans" of alien laborers, by
means of the political, religious, and educational institutions of the
country. How inadequate these unaided agencies are for the accomplishment
of their gigantic task is nowhere so clearly realized as in the common, or
free, schools of the States. These, in districts such as I have
distinguished as "American," are filled with boys and girls, of all ages
from five to eighteen, whose appearance and intelligence bespeak high
social conditions. Whatever the occupation which these young people may
ultimately adopt--and all of them are destined for work-a-day lives--an
observer feels quite sure that they are more likely to raise the character
of their several employments, than to be themselves degraded to lower
social levels, on quitting school.

But no similar confidence in the future of American labor is engendered by
visits to the schools where sits the progeny of alien labor. In the case
of the Canadians, indeed, parents and priests alike bend all their
energies to the establishment of "parochial schools," which, if they
forward the cause of the Church, do little for education in the American
sense of requiring good citizens, even more than good s