And
isn't it good that it is?
In all of which I have made no account of a factor which is at
the bottom of half our troubles with our immigrant population, so
far as they are not of our own making: the loss of reckoning that
follows uprooting; the cutting loose from all sense of responsibility,
with the old standards gone, that makes the politician's job so
profitable in our large cities, and that of the patriot and the
housekeeper so wearisome. We all know the process. The immigrant
has no patent on it. It afflicts the native, too, when he goes to
a town where he is not known. In the slum it reaches its climax in
the second generation, and makes of the Irishman's and the Italian's
boys the "toughs" who fight the battles of Hell's Kitchen and Frog
Hollow. It simply means that we are creatures of environment, that
a man everywhere is largely what his neighbors and his children
think him to be, and that government makes for our moral good
too, dreamers and anarchists to the contrary notwithstanding. But,
simple as it is, it has been too long neglected for the safety of
the man and of the State.
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