The Billings gazette. [volume] (Billings, Mont.) 1896-1919, 1901-12-20
ing gaudy tales Of suffering and losses
on the ranges the minute snow be-
gins to fall.
is HUMAN.

IMMIGRANT is HUMAN.
Minneapolis Journal: Recently
some one came to the defense of the
foreign element in the great cities
and asserted that it was not they tina,
made our American cities so bad gov
ernmentally and otherwise, but that
it was the cities that corrupted them
At any rate it was shown that these
people come from countries whose
cities show no such specimens OF
municipal misrule as can be so fire.
quently found in America.
An explanation of the moral deter.
ioration which takes hold upon 50
many of u new citizens after they
reach this country is given by Jacob
Riis in his fascinating book, 1.-THE
Making of an American" He says
that 1t is simply the natural n
quenc of the breaking off all the ties
and associations of the old home. In
the interval before the new ones are
firmly established in the new home
the immigrant is without those salu-
tary restraints that arise from the
occupation of a fixed place in the es-
tablished order of things.
We do not fully appreciate how
much environment of the right kind
makes for goodness in the Individual.
just as environment of the wrong
kind makes for evil. The man who
lives where his fathers lived before
him, who has only to go on in the way
they went, who is known from baby
hood up by all the members of the
local community, who knows that his
misdemeanor will be village or neigh
borhood gossip, and that his least
moral offense will be scandal, who
feels that he is not outside but a part
of the social system, is under very
weak temptation to depart from the
standard Of behavior generally accept
ed as p%assable. Take this man of ave
age excellence, of moral conduct,
amputate him from his cOmmunity.
pick him up, mix him with thousands
of others, likewise cut off from their
old, fixed life and transport them
across three thousand miles of sea and
drop them down in the. midst of the
temptations of u American cities.
OF coures they feel that there are no
jealousy watching them; that
they are responsible only to them
selves for their actions; that what
they do can neither concern nor injure
any one they care for. What differ
does it make what we do? ex-
presses their feeling. There are none
Of the forces of acquaintance, of regard
FOR the opinion and estimates of neigh
bors, of the dread of shame to hold
them back.
Such immigrants may be compared
to those good Americans who 20 to
Paris and misbehave themselves
shockingly because with the crossing
If the Atlantic they leave behind them
restraints that make it difficult for
hem to lead other than moral lives at
home. They. are not unlike the rural
st who goes to New York on a bust
errand and takes advantage of
lis temporary mergence in that human
mass, one unnoticed grain of sand in
hill, to give way to the diabolism
hat lives in the soul of every man and
protests and rebels forever against
he laws and habits of the better
of his nature. 1t is not that the
immigrant is hopelessly bad that he
ometimes makes such a bad citizen,
ut that he is human and subjected
o extraordinary temptations just at
time that, by force of circum-
tances, he is deprived of the rein
orcements that supported him against
he mild temptations of the old home.