sponsible part in the government respecting those affairs which immediately concern them things in which they are intimately interested. Plant such persons in communities which are still in an inchoate formative state, where the management of the public business in the directest possible way, visibly touches the home of every inhabitant, and where everybody feels himself imperatively called upon to give attention to it for the protection or promotion of his own interests, and people ever so little used to that sort of thing will take to democratic selfgovernment as a duck takes to water. They may do so somewhat clumsily at first and make grievous mistakes, but those very mistakes with their disagreeable consequences will serve to sharpen the wits of those who desire to learn which every person of average intelligence, who feels himself responsible for his own interests, desires to do. In other words, practice upon one's own responsibility is the best if not the only school of self-government. What is sometimes called the "art of self-government" is not learned by masses of people theoretically, nor even by the mere presentation of other people's experiences by way of instructive example. Practice is the only really effective teacher. Other methods of instruction will rather retard, if not altogether prevent, the development of the self-governing capacity, because they will serve to weaken the sense of responsibility and self-reliance.

In discussing the merits of self-government we are apt to commit the error of claiming that self-government furnishes the best possible — that is, the wisest and at the same time most economical kind of government as to the practical administration of public affairs, for it does not. There is no doubt that a despot, if he were supremely wise, absolutely just, benevolent, and unselfish, might

furnish a community, as far as the practical working of the administrative machinery goes, better government than the majority of the citizens subject to changeable currents of public opinion-in all things except one. But this one thing is of the highest importance. Selfgovernment as an administrator is subject to criticism for many failures. But it is impossible to overestimate self-government as an educator. The foreign observer in America is at once struck by the fact that the average of intelligence, as the intelligence manifests itself in the spirit of inquiry, in the interest taken in a great variety of things, and in alertness and judgment, is much higher among the masses here than anywhere else. This is certainly not owing to any superiority of the public school system in this country- or, if such superiority exists, not to that alone - but rather to the fact that here the individual is constantly brought into interested contact with a greater variety of things, and is admitted to active participation in the exercise of functions which in other countries are left to the care of a superior authority. I have frequently been struck by the remarkable expansion of the horizon effected by a few years of American life, in the minds of immigrants who had come from somewhat benighted regions, and by the mental enterprise and keen discernment with which they took hold of problems which, in their comparatively torpid condition in their native countries, they had never thought of. It is true that, in our large cities with congested population, self-government as an educator does not always bring forth the most desirable results, partly owing to the circumstance that government, in its various branches, is there further removed from the individual, so that he comes into contact with it and exercises his influence upon it only through

variable, and sometimes questionable, intermediary agencies, which frequently exert a very demoralizing influence. But my observations and experiences in the young West, although no doubt I saw not a few things to be regretted, on the whole greatly strengthened my faith in the democratic principle. It was with a feeling of religious devotion that I took part in Fourth of July celebrations, the principal feature of which then consisted in the solemn reading of the Declaration of Independence before the assembled multitude; and the principal charm the anti-slavery cause had for me consisted in its purpose to make the principles proclaimed by that Declaration as true in the universality of practical application as they were true in theory. And there was the realization of the ideal I had brought with me from the luckless struggles for free government in my native land.

THE LOYALTY OF THE FOREIGN BORN 1

M. E. RAVAGE (1884- )

What does America mean to me, to the immigrant generally, with his manifold attachments, his double culture, his composite point of view as an outsider and an insider at one and the same time?

I am glad the question has at last been raised. For a whole century you have been seeking and listening attentively to the conflicting opinions of foreign travelers and critics on your institutions and character. But there was a foreigner right here who had come to America not

1 An extract from an article published under this title in the Century Magazine for June, 1917. Used by permission of the publishers and the author.

Did

as a sight-seer, but as a settler, not as a guest, but as an invader, not to look you over, but to make you over. you ever stop to ask him what his views of you were? Did you, indeed, think that he had any? Because the immigrant was inarticulate you concluded, I fear, that he was insensible. He was dumb, and you thought him blind and deaf as well. Yet all the time, while you were ignoring him or making good-humored jokes about him or pitying him a little, he went his way, very much on the alert, registering impressions, making mental notes, and laboriously piecing out a picture of America which, as I shall endeavor to show you, is fundamentally at variance with your own, if not hopelessly antagonistic to it.

How this picture of America originated in my mind — for I am one of your alien Americans and what it is like, it will be hard for you to grasp until you have first understood the causes that impelled me to forsake my ancient home and to accept voluntary exile in yours. No one, I assure you, embarks upon the adventure in a light-hearted mood. In one sense it is precisely as my native friend puts it — I was driven into exile. Not from without, pray understand, but from within. My own rebellious spirit was the spur. I revolted against the Old World - against its folly, its insolence, its degradation. From birth onward I had been made a victim of every species of discrimination, of poverty, of oppression. I suffered unendurably from the military, the gendarme, the taxgatherer; from ignorance, from bigotry, from snobbishness. As long as I was a child I submitted to it all unquestioningly as to the order of nature. I took hunger as a punishment from Heaven, and religious persecution as a divine testing of my faith.

When I asked why my family was deprived of its breadwinner for months at a time, and why he was compelled to drill in maneuvers, and why a strange man with a badge came to our house to ask for money, and took away our table silver and our pillows when it was not forthcoming, my mother told me with tears in her eyes that it was the law, and I asked no more. But as I grew to manhood I began to see these things differently. I began to see that class distinctions were stupid, that oppression was an impertinence, that poverty was an affront to the dignity of human beings. And I came to despise the Old World, with its mischievous egotism called nationality, its narrowness, its distrusts, its prejudices, its willful blindness to the clear destiny of the race, its obdurate opposition to the aspirations of the mass of mankind. I wanted violently to lay hands on the whole outworn pile and set it tumbling. But as I could not do that, I emigrated to the New World. . .

I emigrated because I had gained a new faith. America to me was not a nation. I did not come here in search of a new nationality. She was not even a country. She was an ideal. It seemed to me that humanity had started out wrongly in the Old World, had erred and blundered and floundered to its own destruction; then a handful of choice spirits had risen in arms against the decayed tradition of Europe, determined that humanity should have a new start. And ever since that time the dreamers and the rebels and the heroes of all nations had beaten a fanlike convergence of paths to her gates. She had become the model of revolution and the Mecca of revolutionists, from France to China, and from Kosciuszko and the forty-eighters to the modern Russian bundist. America was not merely the New World: she was the