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Our country was criginally in possession of the Indians; Huropean 
immigrants gradually displaced them. The early comers found a wilder- 
ness; they cut down forests and cultivated the land. They thrived exceed- 
ingly and built up towns and cities. Immigrants in large numbers have 
continued to come, but those who come today find all the land occupied. 
The poor immigrant no longer can or does settle in the country; he goes to 
the crowded cities where there is a demand for labor. Many of the present 
immigrants come from the open country; they are used to open air life, as 
their ancestors had always been. There has been little or no weeding out 
such as we find among people whose ancestors lived under city conditions. 
AS a consequence, when these immigrants crowd into our cities—and of 
necessity they crowd into what are called slums rather than go to clean 
portions—they soon fail. Why is it that the children of the stolid immi- 
grants are called neurotic? 
Immigrants massed in cities need a change of environment. Country 
people thrive best under country conditions; many are wholly unadapted to 
city life with its many-sided contact with ill health and disease. Most 
immigrants are from country districts. No wonder the old farmer referred 
to his grandchildren as “weaklings’, and believed that the race is degen- 
erating, and no wonder physicians find children with all sorts of abnormal- 
ities and defects and that many are neurotic. Children, like plants, need 
room to grow; if massed together they, like plants, become stunted—in the 
end it is, of course, a survival of the fittest. 
This brings up the very practical question, Why do we allow slums to 
exist? Why do we allow people to live under slum conditions? European 
cities are driving out their slums, but we have scarcely made any effort. 
I referred to a plot of ground that is “going back to nature’. Perhaps 
we can find analogies among men. In the first place, there are situations 
where we scarcely expect to find certain people. For instance, people who 
normally live in the slums are not to be found among the better class. 
What do we mean by “the better class’? Do we not find a constant 
shifting about, some drop out, some rise and enter it? The old saying, 
From shirt sleeve to shirt sleeve, is very expressive. Very often, how- 
ever, the dropping out is due to ill bealth. 
Civilization, like farming and gardening, means a constant interference 
with nature. It is man against nature. When man gets back to nature 
old-time conditions never return, man again becomes strong and robust. We 
