Merrily taking twopenny rum, and cheese with a pocket knife.
Poverty, we are assured, is an 'error,' like ill-health and crime. It is an anachronism in civilization, a stain upon a wisely governed land. But into our country which, after a human fashion, is both wise and foolish, pours the poverty of Europe. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants with but a few dollars between them and want; with scant equipment, physical or mental, for the struggle of life; with an inheritance of feebleness from ill-nourished generations before them,--this is the problem which the United States faces courageously, and solves as best she can. What she cannot do is miraculously to convert poverty into plenty,--certainly not before the next year doubles, and the third year trebles the miracle-seeking multitude. She cannot properly house or profitably employ a million of immigrants before the next million is clamoring at her doors. Nor is she even given a fair chance to accomplish her giant task. The demagogues who are employed in the congenial sport of railroad baiting, and who are enjoying beyond measure the fun of chivying business interests into dusty corners, are the ones to lift up their voices in shrill appeal for the army of the unemployed. They refuse to connect one phenomenon with the other. The notion that crippling industries will benefit the industrious is not so new as it seems. Æsop must have had a clear insight into its workings when he wrote the fable of the goose that laid the golden egg.
The City of New York expends, according to a recent report of the Hospital Investigating Committee, more than a million of dollars a year for the care of sick, defective, and otherwise helpless aliens. It expended in 1913 nearly four hundred thousand dollars for the care of aliens who had been in this country less than five years. This is the record of our greatest city, the one in which the astute immigrant takes up his abode. The education she gives her little foreign-born children comprises for the most part manual and vocational training, clinics for the defective, schools for the incorrigible, free or cost-price lunches, doctoring, dentistry, the care of trained nurses, and a score of similar attentions unknown to an earlier generation, undreamed of in the countries whence these children come. In return for such fostering care, New York is held up to execration because she has the money to pay the taxes which are expended in this fashion, because she lays the golden egg which benefits the poor of twenty nations. Her unemployed (reinforced hugely from less favored communities) riot in her streets and churches, and agitators curse her for a thing of evil, a city of palaces and slums, corroded with the