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Among the influences which, in America, promote harmony between alien races, the public school plays a most important part. The children, the teachers, the parents–whether of emigrant or native origin–the relatives and friends in distant countries, are all brought more or less under its amalgamating influences. In the schoolroom the child finds friends and playmates belonging to races widely different from his own; there Greek meets not only Greek, but Turk, American, Irish, German, French, English, Italian and Hungarian, and representatives of every other nation under the sun. The lion lying down with the lamb was nothing to it, because the lamb, though its feelings are not enlarged upon, must have been distinctly uncomfortable. But in the schoolroom Jew and Gentile work and play together; and black and white learn love and knowledge side by side.

And long after more formal instruction has faded with the passing of the years a man of, perhaps, German origin will think kindly of the whole irresponsible Irish race when he remembers little Bridget O’Connor, who sat across the aisle in the old Cherry Street school, her quick temper and her swift remorse.

Of course, all these nationalities are rarely encountered in one district, but a teacher often finds herself responsible for fifty children representing five or six of them. In the lower grades eight or ten may be so lately arrived as to speak no English. The teacher presiding over this polyglot community is often, herself, of foreign birth, yet they get on very well together, are very fond of one another, and very happy. The little foreigners, assisted by their more well-informed comrades, learn the language of the land, I regret to say that it is often tinctured with the language of the Bowery, in from six to twelve weeks, six weeks for the Jews, and twelve for the slower among the Germans’ children. And again, it will be difficult to stir Otto Schmidt, at any stage of his career, into antagonism against the Jewish race, when he remembers the patience and loving kindness with which Maxie Fishandler labored with him and guided his first steps through the wilderness of the English tongue.

These indirect but constant influences are undeniably the strongest, but at school the child is taught in history of the heroism and the strength of men and nations other than his own; he learns, with some degree of consternation, that Christopher Columbus was a “Dago,” George Washington an officer in the English Army, and Christ, our Lord, a Jew. Geography, as it is now taught with copious illustrations and descriptions, shows undreamed-of beauties in countries hitherto despised. And gradually, as the pupils move on from class to class, they learn true democracy and man’s brotherhood to man.

But the work of the American public school does not stop with the children who come directly under its control. The board of education reaches, as no other organization does, the great mass of the population. All the other boards and departments established for the help and guidance of these people only succeed in badgering and frightening them. They are met, even at Ellis Island, by the board of health and they are subjected to all kinds of disagreeable and humiliating experiences culminating sometimes in quarantine and sometimes in deportation. Even after they have passed the barrier of the emigration office, the monster still pursues them. It disinfects their houses, it confiscates the rotten fish and vegetables which they hopefully display on their push-carts, it objects to their wrenching off and selling the plumbing appliances in their apartments, it interferes with them in twenty ways a day and hedges them round about with a hundred laws which they can only learn, as Parnell advised a follower to learn the rules of the House of Commons, by breaking them.

Then comes the department of street cleaning, with its extraordinary ideas of the use of a thoroughfare. The new-comer is taught that the street is not the place for dead cats and cabbage stalks, and other trifles for which he has no further use. Neither may it be used, except with restrictions, as a bedroom or a nursery. The emigrant, puzzled but obliging, picks his progeny out of the gutter and lays it on the fire-escape. He then makes acquaintance of the fire department, and listens to its heated arguments. So perhaps he, still willing to please, reclaims the dead cat and the cabbage stalk, and proceeds to cremate them in the privacy of the back yard. Again the fire department, this time in snorting and horrible form, descends upon him. And all these manifestations of freedom are attended by the blue-coated police who interdict the few relaxations unprovided for by the other powers. These human monsters confiscate stilettos and razors; discourage pocket-picking, brick-throwing, the gathering of crowds and the general enjoyment of life. Their name is legion. Their appetite for figs, dates, oranges and bananas and graft is insatiable; they are omnipresent; they are argus-eyed; and their speech is always, “Keep movin’ there. Keep movin’.” And all these baneful influences may be summoned and set in action by another, but worse than all of them, known as the Gerry Society. This tyrant denies the parent’s right in his own child, forbids him to allow a minor to work in sweatshop, store, or even on the stage, and enforces these commands, even to the extreme of removing the child altogether and putting it in an institution.