AMALGAMATING OUR FOREIGN BORN 



nearly all do well in their studies if they 

 attend adults remain little affected. 

 Teachers in their districts gain hardly any 

 access to them. Clergymen of their nation- 

 alities, often unintelligent, are their sole 

 leaders and advisers. The conservative 

 tendency is so strong that clannishness out- 

 lives the first generation and the second, pro- 

 jecting itself on and on even after all its 

 subjects have learned our speech and most 

 of them forgotten their own. 



Still, it would be the height' of impolicy 

 to dissuade our foreign born, even if we 

 could, from using their native tongues in 

 books, papers, conversation, schools, and 

 church services. The net result of such 

 vernacularism is to introduce American 

 ideas, though in a roundabout way, into a 

 multitude of mature and influential minds 

 to which this is the only avenue. 



A sure sign that there is defiant "foreign- 

 ism" in one of these "nub" communities is 

 its dislike to outsiders, opposition to mar- 

 riage between its youth and American 

 youth, and its wish, sometimes forcibly ex- 



