That such has been his
sorry function has been his misfortune as well as theirs. Would it not
be equally natural and far more fair to utilize his presence among us
to raise our civic and economic and industrial standards? It is no
new story, this. Out of every social problem we can construct a
stepping-stone to something better and higher than was before. The
most that we know of health has been learned through a study of
the misadjustments that bring about disease. What has been done
educationally to assist the defective, the handicapped and the
dependent has thrown a flood of light upon the training of the normal
child. Through work undertaken in the first instance for the benefit
of the exceptions, the minority, the whole community has benefited.
In this connection no one will deny that immigrants, both men and
women, have their handicaps. In the great majority of instances they
are handicapped by an upbringing among primitive conditions, by their
unavoidable ignorance of our language and our customs, and by a quite
natural mental confusion as to our standards of conduct, to them
so curiously exacting in some respects as, for instance, where the
schooling of their children is concerned, so incomprehensibly lax in
others, say, in the unusual freedom accorded to those same children
when grown but a little older.
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