to 7,000 votes could not be cast because of inadequacy of the polling facilities.

WHAT THE CHILDREN DID

The children were a vital factor in the campaign. After the elections they were asked to collect tags and bring them to school. Out of 29,000 tags given out at one election, they brought back more than 17,000. After the next election they brought back 27,000 out of 37,000. Flags were given as prizes to the schools showing the highest totals.

In the schools-and all schools were enlisted, parochial and private as well as public schools-the children wrote letters, and later little essays, describing their experiences, telling why it was important to vote, and what the issues were. The response was instantaneous, enthusiastic; and it requires no special imagination to infer the effect in individual homes, not only in compelling American citizens to vote, but in virtually forcing alien fathers and mothers to avoid embarrassment at their own firesides by expediting their efforts to gain citizenship.

Space is not available for extensive quotation of the children's essays; but their general tenor, and the reflex influence of their spirit upon the homes, may be imagined from such excerpts as these:

By an eleven-year-old boy, fifth grade: The men and women who are citizens of the United States are regular voters; if they are not, they should be. . . . If all the people voted, we should have a clean city. If your mother has to do all the dishes, you can say, "Why, mother, I can do the dishes while you go and vote." Your father may have to rake the yard. Why not rake the yard yourself and let your father go and vote? Then the children and their parents will be good citizens.

By a girl in the sixth grade: The American government is governed by the people by means of voting. If people do not vote it is their fault that we have poor officials. . . . The anarchist and the other people who ignore our government are both destroying it, only the anarchist destroys it violently and the people who ignore it, slowly. Some aliens come here to enjoy all our privileges without becoming citizens. They save their money and go back to their old country. But some aliens appreciate our government, and are now of the best citizens we have. Join hands with the American government. Mother, do not let Dad do it alone!

There is plenty of direct testimony as to the effect of this enterprise in the home, not only of the American citizens, but of the aliens. Thousands of mothers who otherwise might have remained prisoners to indifference and drudgery have been fairly driven out into the liberation of social contacts and into a broader life of interest in all the things that make for responsible citizenship by the interest of their children.

It is in their homes that the foreign-born women must be reached with inspiration and enlightenment as to their part in the process of self-government and the privileges, duties, and responsibilities—and activities— which are essential to anything worthy to be called American citizenship.

ΧΙ

THE FOREIGN-BORN VOTER IN ACTION

THERE is not and never has been in the United States anything that could be segregated as the "labor vote," although such a thing has been the dream of many labor leaders, the bugaboo-or rather the ignis fatuus— of politicians of many parties, and a permanently legendary figure in the popular speech. The absence of such a vote is the principle reason for the political futility of most of the efforts of the Socialist parties.

Time and again, since the beginning of our existence as a nation, efforts-some of them with a measure of success promising or menacing according to one's sympathy and point of view-have been made to get united political action on the part of citizens who worked with their hands as supposedly distinguished from those who worked with their brains. The effort never has come to other than temporary local success; although it may be conceded that, in some measure, the issues upon which the efforts were predicated afterward came to be those upon which the great parties fought out their battles; or, more likely, came slowly to substantial acceptance through economic development or sometimes as the direct fruit of campaign agitation.

The reasons for this failure to precipitate and organize the mythical "labor vote" are many and diverse, but certain of them are essential and fairly evident:

First, the fact that in this country social and industrial conditions have hitherto been, and probably for

an indefinite period will continue to be, such as to emphasize individualism. It is true, despite any denials or theories, that industry, initiative, enterprise, always have won, still win, and will continue to win advancement above the herd. The top is still open for those who can win to it by their own inherent qualities. There has been here, there is now, no permanent industrial or social caste classification to circumscribe ambition and create either a persisting intellectual leadership of "labor" or a stable body of hand-workers susceptible of political coherence or direction. All efforts to

crystallize "class consciousness" for political action have failed, and probably will continue to fail as long as the social bars are down so that individuals can pass freely from one class to another.

Second, the immensity of our territory and the great diversity of interests and issues in the forefront of public attention in one section and another. Seldom, if ever, have the conditions which might have solidified any class been sufficiently widespread or synchronous to serve the purpose of united political sentiment or action. Add to this the fact that politicians of both the great parties, more or less intentionally, have managed always to frame the issues so as to encourage this diversity.

Third, the deliberate and long-standing policy of the most influential of the general leaders of the labor organizations-Mr. Samuel Gompers for the most conspicuous example of keeping those organizations free from the entanglements and distractions of party politics, definitely preventing their acting as a political unit; by intention confining their activities to the industrial, the economic field. This alone, without regard to the fact that the higher-grade unions (using that expression solely with reference to skill) seldom see their interests to be common, so far as the ballot box

is concerned. The radical agitation for the establishment of "One Big Union," to include all classes of laborers as distinguished from capitalists, while it contemplates chiefly the exercise of industrial and economic power, includes the intention to concentrate political power as well.

Fourth, and most important, the fact that "labor," in the sense in which most politicians, and virtually all of the public, use the term, means chiefly the unskilled workers who contribute muscle to industry. These are to a great extent unorganized, without any conscious unity of interest or purpose; their approach to both industry and political action is as individuals—individuals of more or less shifting residence and comparatively little feeling of political responsibility. Moreover, it is a matter of common knowledge that the great industrial concerns have fostered the existence of masses of unskilled labor, in excess of the actual needs of industry, in order to maintain an "overstocked" labor supply, for the purpose of constant wage-competition to keep down costs. This competition has the inevitable effect of discouraging united action of any kind. And, still further, we have found1 that the unskilled laborer of foreign birth, on the average, is not available for political activity because he is not naturalized.

This body of the unskilled, industrially indispensable, but politically unassimilated, inarticulate, and unwholesome, consists almost entirely now, and must consist increasingly, of immigrants. Like any other mass of material in an organism, potentially digestible and useful but actually undigested and in the circumstances indigestible, it has clogged the process of assimilation and is infecting the body politic with dangerous toxins. The wonder is that we have got along with it

1 See Appendix Tables of Occupations, Tables LXIII and LXIV.