census map of the United States. Next year we shall have a new one, for by then, ten years more of our history will have been completed. The census map comes out once every decade, printed in different colors, showing the location of the foreign-born in the United States. The American-born regions have appeared in steadily lessening areas as the decades have passed.
It is only with a grave heart that any real American can face the census map to-day. The conviction is inevitable that we have been too long careless of our racial problems. If we are to have an America now, we must change. Our golden age of money-making is not a double decade in extent. We cannot go that road another twenty years. If your son is meant to be an American, have him study the census map and the story of the A. P. L. Then he will learn something about his own country. He has not known. His father has not known.
The English came early in our history and the Scotch-Irish, the finest of frontier stock. The Pennsylvania Dutch came and built homes. Then came the Irish, facile and quick to blend. Our immigration before the Civil War was north-European—sturdy stock, fit for the forests and prairies and the vast new farm lands of the West. Now we began to mine and manufacture more, and our immigrants changed the colors of the census map. We began to import work cattle, not citizens, for our so-called industrial captains. Steamship companies combed southern and southeastern Europe. Our miners could not speak English. The Irishman worked no more on the railroads, the sewers, the streets—he shrank from the squat foreigner as the lean Yankee shrank from him—as the Italian, in turn, will shrink from the Russian bolshevist, if we allow him to swarm in.
The map shows you all these things inexorably. It shows the shrinking of the American-born regions to-day to only a small spot on the tops of the Cumberlands in Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina and a corner of Alabama and Georgia. Now check up this rough census outline with the reports printed in these pages from all over America. We soberly must conclude that America is not America. We find that the great states of each coast are practically
