by employers in out-of-the-way places to break strikes, the immigrant may conclude, "American democracy is a sham." Happily, in recent years the alien has more friends to stand up for him, so that nowadays his ignorance is less abused. The war caused us to realize that, in expecting that all the immigrants would of themselves come to understand what we are trying to do in this country, we expected too much. We found that many of the foreign-born live in colonies by themselves, speak and read the language of their mother-land, and have no concern for American institutions. Since the only Americans they come in contact with are those who are trying to make money out of them, they get the impression that Americans care only for the dollar. If the Americans wanted a governing class in this country, they would be glad to have the foreign-born live to themselves. But such is not their aim. It is the American idea that public affairs should be the concern of all. Hence, an "Americanization" movement has sprung up, the aim of which is to enlist the good will and help of the foreign-born on behalf of the experiment in democracy we have embarked on. The thought is that if every man who comes here is made to feel himself "one of the family," we shall come so much the nearer to President Lincoln's ideal of "government of the people, by the people, for the people." No CHAPTER II MAKING A LIVING state in the Union can interfere with commerce among the states. The result is that the economic life of the nation develops almost as if state lines did not exist. The vast area thus dedicated to free trade is so varied in climate and natural resources that it is virtually a world in itself. For this reason the internal trade of the United States completely overshadows its foreign trade in volume and importance, one result being that high duties on foreign goods imported have never cut off the consuming public from a very important or necessary market. "Yankee ingenuity" is a byword. No doubt the Americans were as competent as any other people to provide themselves with manufactured goods. But factories were slow in coming, because for a hundred years the frontier vied with the factories in attracting the over 25 flow of population from the farms. In other words, the lure of Western land retarded the growth of American manufactures. It was hard, too, for young enterprises of this kind to stand up under the practice of "dumping" by the older industries across the sea. Had nothing been done about it, it is likely that during its era of settlement the United States would have remained chiefly a producer of food and raw materials, exchanging its surplus for the products of Old-World factories. It was the unwillingness of the people to abide in such dependence on foreign sources of supply, and their desire for a symmetrical economic development of the nation, which prompted the policy of fostering home industries by a protective tariff. Owing to its specialization on cotton-growing, and to the unfitness of negroes as mill-hands, the South has been tardy in developing manufactures, and up to about 1900 set its face like flint against the high-tariff policy. The one insatiable need of the country has been for transportation. Hence, the conquest of space is the epic exploit in our economic history. In a couple of lifetimes the Americans have had to equip a territory as big as all Europe, outside of Russia, with highways such |