domestic manufacture, or, indeed, constructively in any direction. No
activity is supplied to take the place of that which, in Italy, he would
naturally have found in his own surroundings, and no new union with
wholesome life is made for him.

Italian parents count upon the fact that their children learn the
English language and American customs before they do themselves, and the
children act not only as interpreters of the language, but as buffers
between them and Chicago, resulting in a certain almost pathetic
dependence of the family upon the child. When a child of the family,
therefore, first goes to school, the event is fraught with much
significance to all the others. The family has no social life in any
structural form and can supply none to the child. He ought to get it in
the school and give it to his family, the school thus becoming the
connector with the organized society about them. It is the children
aged six, eight, and ten, who go to school, entering, of course, the
primary grades. If a boy is twelve or thirteen on his arrival in
America, his parents see in him a wage-earning factor, and the girl of
the same age is already looking toward her marriage.

Let us take one of these boys, who has learned in his six or eight years
to speak his native language, and to feel himself strongly identified
with the fortunes of his family. Whatever interest has come to the minds
of his ancestors has come through the use of their hands in the open
air; and open air and activity of body have been the inevitable
accompaniments of all their experiences. Yet the first thing that the
boy must do when he reaches school is to sit still, at least part of the
time, and he must learn to listen to what is said to him, with all the
perplexity of listening to a foreign tongue. He does not find this very
stimulating, and is slow to respond to the more subtle incentives of the