bituminous fields conditions are no better. In the town of Windber in
western Pennsylvania, for example, some two thousand experienced
English and American miners were engaged in opening the veins in 1897.
No sooner were the mines in operation than the south European began to
drift in. Today he outnumbers and underbids the American and the north
European. He lives in isolated sections, reeking with everything that
keeps him a "foreigner" in the heart of America. The coal regions of
Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois and the ore
regions of northern Michigan and Minnesota are rapidly passing under
the same influence.

Every mining and manufacturing community is thus an ethnic pool,
whence little streams of foreigners trickle over the land. These
isolated miners and tillers of the soil are more immune to American
ideals than are their city dwelling brethren. They are not jostled and
shaken by other races; no mental contagion of democracy reaches them.

But within the towns and cities another process of replacement is
going on. Its index is written large in the signs over shops and
stores and clearly in the lists of professional men in the city
directories and in the pay roll of the public school teachers. The
unpronounceable Slavic combinations of consonants and polysyllabic
Jewish patronymics are plentiful, while here and there an Italian name
makes its appearance. The second generation is arriving. The sons and
daughters are leaving the factory and the construction gang for the
counter, the office, and the schoolroom.

American ideals and institutions have borne and can bear a great deal
of foreign infiltration. But can they withstand saturation?