58 PROCEEDINGS OF THIRTY-THIRD FRUIT-GROWERS ' CONVENTION. 



have committed to them the task of assimilating the southeastern Euro- 

 pean population that is coming in! (Laughter and great applause.) 

 We have got to assimilate, raise them up; and these theorists never 

 reflect that in the process of assimilation it is not the immigrants who 

 are raised up, but American blood that is pulled down. In the process 

 of assimilating this labor what has occurred? In the first place, the 

 youth of the United States has deteriorated. In the last thirty years the 

 age of men at the date of their first conviction for crime in this country 

 has fallen from nearly 30 years down to less than 21. We have created 

 in all of our large cities a juvenile court, especially charged with juris- 

 diction to take care of juvenile criminals and offenders. As a result 

 of this process of assimilation and the degradation of our own blood 

 in that process we are building in every State north of the Mason and 

 Dixon line what we call reform schools for the same penalizing of 

 incorrigible American youth. Pick up your morning newspaper in 

 San Francisco ; read the list of Americans committed to the prisons 

 for any transgressions, and you will see that in seven cases out of ten 

 the transgressors are under twenty-one years of age. In this process 

 of assimilating and opening our labor field to this debased southern 

 and southeastern European immigration we are destroying the future 

 of the republic. An apprenticeship denied in order to leave all the 

 work to the undesirable immigrant ! Talk about Chinese competition ! 

 What have you to say to the organizations in this country which abso- 

 lutely deny to an American-born boy the right to an apprenticeship 

 and to a trade? That isn't monopoly at all. (Applause.) It is the 

 problem in all our large cities. And so we go on debasing and degrad- 

 ing our young blood, criminalizing our own youth and condemning 

 them to live in the vice of idleness, in order that we may assimilate an 

 immigration that, in respect to law and order, industry and fidelity, 

 is as much below the Chinaman as the monkey is below the Chinaman. 



But we go on saying something because somebody else has said it. 

 If the rural industries of California, the foundation of all prosperity, 

 require this Asiatic non-competitive labor— a labor and form of immi- 

 gration that we don't have to assimilate— we are not committing that 

 hard task to our sons and daughters, to our grandsons and grand- 

 daughters, and our descendants. It is labor that is here to do our work 

 for our wages, to behave itself, as far as the white people are concerned, 

 in an orderly and law-abiding manner— its disorders being amongst its 

 own members— a most desirable form of labor. 



But they say there is a race question. Mr. Furuseth of San Fran- 

 cisco, head of the water-front federation, has discovered that there 

 is a great race antagonism. I was reading the latest work on ethnology, 

 Professor Tyler, and I find that the Russian Finns are pure Mongols; 



