At the Inter-city Conference of Settlement Workers in Boston last year it became very clear that some of the leaders were anxious to make their work among foreigners count for more. Dr. Jane Robbins took the position that assimilation would be expedited and rendered more stable by means of the training of young foreigners, Italians and the like, as social workers in order that they might contribute their own enthusiasm and knowledge of the traditions and prejudices of their people to the task of Americanization. Miss Lillian Wald, the president of the National Federation of Settlements, maintained that the best assimilative work of all could be done through the settlement which she called “The House of the Interpreter.” The inculcation of the neighborhood spirit, she added, stimulates a wholesome rivalry and promotes better housing and social standards than can be secured by other means. Vida Scudder insisted upon the vital necessity of rescuing settlement work from philanthropic tendencies. She suggested that truer democracy and helpfulness in the work of assimilation of all elements of the national life could be brought about by greater attention on the part of settlements to all the forward movements of the working class for whom settlements exist. Miss Scudder argued that settlement workers ought to perfect the technique of the settlement organization in such a way that they would be free in times of crises to assist in all working class movements which have as their aim the improvement of the conditions of life and labor. In this position, Miss Scudder would sympathize with and encourage work along lines similar to that pursued by Miss Cross in her Rochester work, to which we have referred.

The problem of fair citizenship for the negro is receiving no little attention from those women interested in the assimilation of races. The National League on Urban Conditions Among Negroes is an organization of men and women with headquarters in New York, formed “to help in counteracting this migration to the cities and to make efforts for improving the serious social conditions growing up among the negroes in the cities.”

This League is a consolidation of the National League for the Protection of Colored Women formed in 1906, after revelations were made of the abuses in the employment agencies connected with the emigration of negro women from the South, and of the Committee for Improving the Industrial Conditions of Negroes, in New York, which recognized the industrial and educational handicaps of the negro and sought to equip him better for life.

The consolidated body is making studies of negroes in cities, seeking to secure wider recreational, educational, and industrial facilities, and, what is perhaps most important of all, training negro social workers to do themselves the needed work for their own race. Among the effective women workers in this organization is Elizabeth Walton.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is also a body of men and women. It seeks to secure for the negroes “full enjoyment of their rights as citizens, justice in all courts, and equality of opportunity everywhere.” Among the women who are earnest supporters of this society are Miss Mary White Ovington of Brooklyn, Jane Addams of Chicago, Mrs. Florence Kelley, Miss Lillian Wald and Mrs. Max Morgenthau of New York. Miss May Childs Nerney is the secretary.

It is to a woman, Mrs. Louise de Koven Bowen, that we owe one of our best brief studies of the colored people’s problems in a great northern city. Her article published in The Survey, entitled, “The Colored People of Chicago: Where Their Opportunity Is Choked—Where Open,” is such a trenchant presentation of this problem that it deserves quotation at length here. She says:

In the course of an investigation recently made by the Juvenile Protective Association of Chicago into the condition of boys in the County Jail, the association was much startled by the disproportionate number of colored boys and young men there. Although the colored people of Chicago approximate one-fortieth of the entire population, one-eighth of the boys and young men, and nearly one-third of the girls and young women, who had been confined in the jail during the year, were negroes.

The Association had previously been impressed with the fact that most of the maids employed in houses of prostitution were colored girls and that many employment agencies quite openly sent them there, although they would not take the risk of sending a white girl to a place where, if she was forced into a life of prostitution, the agency would be liable to a charge of pandering.

In an attempt to ascertain the causes which would account for a greater amount of delinquency among colored boys and for the public opinion which so carelessly places the virtue of a colored girl in jeopardy, the Juvenile Protective Association found itself involved in a study of the industrial and social status of the colored people of Chicago.

While the morality of every young person is closely bound up with that of his family and his immediate environment, this is especially true of the sons and daughters of colored families who, because they continually find the door of opportunity shut in their faces, are more easily forced back into their early environment, however vicious it may have been. The enterprising young people in immigrant families who have passed through the public schools and are earning good wages continually succeed in moving their entire households into more prosperous neighborhoods where they gradually lose all trace of their early tenement house experiences. On the contrary, the colored young people, however ambitious, find it extremely difficult to move their families or even themselves into desirable parts of the city and to make friends in these surroundings.

Although no separate schools have ever been established in Chicago, it was found that many colored young people become discouraged in regard to a “high school education” because of the tendency of employers who use colored persons at all in their business to assign to them the most menial labor.

Many a case on record in the Juvenile Protective Association tells a tale of an educated young negro who failed to find employment as stenographer, bookkeeper or clerk. One rather pathetic story is that of a boy graduated from a technical high school last spring. He was sent with other graduates of his class to a big electric company where in the presence of all his classmates he was told that “niggers are not wanted here.”

The Association has on record another instance where a graduate of a business college was refused a position under similar circumstances. This young man, in response to an advertisement, went to a large firm to ask for a position as clerk. “We take colored help only as laborers,” he was told by the manager of a firm supposed to be friendly to the negroes.

All the leading business colleges in Chicago, except one, frankly discriminate against negro students. The one friendly school at present, among twelve hundred white students, has only two colored students, but its records show as many as thirty colored students in the past, although the manager claims that his business has suffered in consequence of his friendliness to the negro.

After an ambitious boy has been refused employment again and again in the larger mercantile and industrial establishments and comes to the conclusion that there is no use in trying to get a decent job, he is in a very dangerous state of mind. Idle and discouraged, his neighborhood environment vicious, such a boy quickly shows the first symptoms of delinquency. Even the superintendent of the Illinois Industrial School for Boys at St. Charles complains that it is not worth while to teach trades to colored boys in his institution because it is so very difficult for a skilled colored man to secure employment. The colored people themselves believe that the employers object to treating the colored man with the respect which a skilled mechanic would command. As a result of this attitude, the colored laborer is being driven to lower kinds of occupation which are gradually being discarded by the white men.

Certainly the investigators found that the great corporations, for one reason or another, refused to employ negroes. Department stores, express companies and the public utility companies employ very few colored people. Out of the 3,795 men employed in Chicago by the eight leading express companies, only twenty-one were colored men. Fifteen of these were porters.

The investigators found no colored men employed as boot-and-shoe-makers, glove-makers, bindery workers, garment workers in factories, cigar box makers, elevated railroad employees, neckwear workers, suspender-makers or printers. No colored women are employed in dress-making, cap-making, lingerie and corset-making. The two reasons given for this non-employment by the employers are: first, the refusal of the white employees to work with colored people; second, the “colored help” is slower and not so efficient as the white. Some employers solve the latter difficulty by paying the colored help less. In the laundries, for instance, where colored people do the same work as white people, the latter average a dollar a week more.

The effect of these restrictions upon negroes is, first, that they are crowded into undesirable and underpaid occupations. As an example, about 12 per cent. of the colored men in Chicago work in saloons and poolrooms. Second, there is greater competition in a limited field with consequent tendency to lower the already low wages. Third, the colored women are forced to go to work to help earn the family living. This occurs so universally as to affect the entire family and social life of the negro colony.

A large number of negroes are employed on the railroads, largely due to the influence of the Pullman Palace Car Company. There is a tradition among colored people that Mr. Pullman inserted a clause in his will urging the company to employ colored men on trains whenever possible, but while the investigators found 1,849 Pullman porters living in Chicago, they counted 7,625 colored men working in saloons and poolrooms. There is also a high percentage employed in theaters; more than one-fourth of all the employees in the leading theaters of Chicago are colored.

The federal government has always been a large employer of colored labor; 9 per cent. of the force in all the federal departments are negroes. In Chicago the percentage of colored men is higher. Out of a total of 8,012 men, 755 are colored, being 10.61 per cent. of the whole, approximately their just share in proportion to the population. The negroes, however, do not fare so well in local government. A study made of the city departments in Chicago showed the percentage of colored employees to be 1.87 per cent.; in Cook County, 1.88 per cent. Three colored men have also been elected as county commissioners, and there is said to be no instance on record in Chicago of a negro office-holder having betrayed his trust.

The investigators found, in regard to the colored men in business: (1) that the greater number of their enterprises are the outgrowth of domestic and personal service occupations; (2) that they are in branches of business which call for small capital and little previous experience.

In the colored belt on the South Side of Chicago a number of business houses are managed by colored people. There is also one bank located in a fine building, of which a colored man is president, but 80 per cent. of the depositors are white. According to the evidence confirmed by the figures of the United States census, there is little possibility for a colored business man to make a living solely from the patronage of his own people. The census report holds that he succeeds in business only when two-thirds of his customers are white. This affords another explanation of the fact that most of his business is of such a character that a white man is willing to patronize it—barber shops, expressing, restaurants, and other occupations suggesting personal service.

There is a large proportion of real estate dealers among colored men, many of whom do business with white people, the negro dealer often becoming the agent for houses which the white dealers refuse to handle. Colored people are eager to own their homes and many of them are buying small houses, divided into two flats, living in one and collecting rent from the other. The contract system prevails in Chicago, making it possible for a man with two or three hundred dollars for the first payment to enter into a contract for the purchase of a piece of property, the deed being held by the real estate man until the purchaser pays the amount stipulated in the contract.

The largest district in Chicago in which colored people have resided for a number of years is the section on the South Side, known as the “black belt” which includes a segregated vice district. In this so-called “belt” the number of children is remarkably small, forming only a little more than one-tenth of the population, and an investigation made by the School of Civics showed that only 26 per cent. of the houses in the South Side and 36 per cent. of the houses in the West Side colored district, were in good repair. Colored tenants reported that they found it impossible to persuade their landlords either to make the necessary repairs or to release them from their contracts, but that it was so hard to find places in which to live that they were forced to endure insanitary conditions.

High rents among the colored people, as everywhere else, force the families to take in lodgers. Nearly one-third of the population in the district investigated on the South Side and one-seventh of the population in the district investigated on the West Side were lodgers. This practice is always found dangerous to family life; it is particularly so to the boys and girls of colored families who, because they so often live near the vice districts, are obliged to have the house filled with “floaters” of a very undesirable class, so that the children witness all kinds of offenses against decency within the home as well as on the streets. [Similar conditions exist in some of the colored districts of New York City.]

It was found that the rent paid by a negro is appreciably higher than that paid by any other nationality. In a flat building formerly occupied by white people, the white families paid a rent of twelve dollars for a six-room apartment for which a negro family is now paying sixteen dollars; a white family paid seventeen dollars for an apartment of seven rooms for which the negroes are now paying twenty dollars.

The negro real estate dealer frequently offers to the owner of an apartment house, which is no longer renting advantageously to white tenants, cash payment for a year’s lease on the property, thus guaranteeing the owner against loss, and then he fills the building with colored tenants. It is said, however, that the agent does not put out the white tenants unless he can get 10 per cent. more from the colored people. By this method the negroes now occupy many large apartment buildings but the negro real estate agents obtain the reputation of exploiting their own race.

When it becomes possible for the colored people of a better class to buy property in a good neighborhood, so that they may take care of their children and live respectably, there are often protest meetings among the white people in the vicinity and sometimes even riots. A striking example of the latter occurred recently on the West Side of Chicago; a colored woman bought a lot near a small park upon which she built a cottage. It was not until she moved into the completed house that the neighbors discovered that a colored family had acquired property there. They immediately began a crusade of insults and threats. When this brought no results, a “night raid” company was organized. In the middle of the night a masked band broke into the house, told the family to keep quiet or they would be murdered; then they tore down the newly built house, destroying everything in it. This is, of course, an extreme instance, but there have been many similar cases. Recently in a suburb of Chicago, animosity against negro residents resulted in the organization of an anti-negro committee, which requested the dismissal of all negroes who were employed in the town as gardeners, janitors, etc., because the necessity of housing their families depressed real estate values.

Supplementary to the previous housing investigations, the Juvenile Protective Association studied the conditions of fifty of the better homes occupied by the colored people of Chicago, those in the so-called “black belts” in the city, those in a suburban district and other houses situated in blocks in which only one or two colored families lived. The size of the houses varied from five to fourteen rooms, averaging eight rooms each. The conditions of the houses inside and out compared favorably with similar houses occupied by white families.

Classified according to occupation, the heads of the household in nine cases were railroad porters, the next largest number were janitors, then waiters, but among them were found lawyers, clergymen and physicians. In only four instances was the woman of the house working outside the home. Only four of the homes took in lodgers and children were found in only fifteen out of the fifty families studied.

The total of thirty-three children found in the fifty homes averages but two-thirds of a child for each family and but for one family—a janitor living in a ten-room house and possessing eight children—the average would have been but half a child for a family. This confirms the statement often made that while the poorer colored people in the agricultural districts of the South, like the poor Italians in rural Italy, have very large families, when they move to the city and become more prosperous, the birth rate among colored people falls below that of the average prosperous American family.

From the homes situated in white neighborhoods, only two reported “indignation meetings when they moved in” and added “quiet now.” One other reported “No affiliation with white neighbors”; another “White neighbors visit in time of sickness” and the third was able to say “Neighbors friendly.” Of the ownership of the fifty homes, thirty-five were owned by colored men, twelve by white landlords and the ownership of three was not ascertained. Thirty-four of the houses were occupied by their owners.

According to the Juvenile Protective Association records, it was found that out of one hundred poor families, eighty-six of the women went out to work. Though there is no doubt that this number is abnormally high, it is always easier for a colored woman to find work than it is for a man, partly because white people have the traditions of colored servants and partly because there is a steadier demand for and a smaller supply of household workers, wash and scrub women, than there is for the kind of unskilled work done by men. Even here they are discriminated against and although many are employed in highly respectable families, there is a tendency to engage them in low-class hotels and other places where white women do not care to go.

Investigators found from consultation with the principals of the schools largely attended by colored children that they are irregular in attendance and often tardy; that they are eager to leave school at an early age, although in one school where there is a great deal of manual work this tendency is less pronounced.

Colored children more than any others are kept at home to care for younger members of the family while the mother is away at work. A persistent violation of the compulsory education law recently tried in the Juvenile Court disclosed the fact that a colored brother and sister had been refused admittance in a day nursery, the old woman who cared for the little household for twenty-five cents a day was ill, and the mother had been obliged to keep the older children at home in order to retain her place in a laundry. At the best the school attendance of her five children had been most unsatisfactory, for she left home every morning at half-past six, and the illiterate old woman in charge of the children took little interest in school. The lack of home training and the fact that many colored families are obliged to live in or near the vice districts perhaps accounts for the indifference to all school interests on the part of many colored children, although this complaint is not made of those in the high schools who come from more prosperous families.

The most striking difference in the health of the colored children compared to that of the white children in the same neighborhood was the larger proportion of the cases of rickets, due of course to malnutrition and neglect. The colored people themselves believe the school authorities are more interested in a school whose patronage is predominantly white.

It was found that young colored girls, like the boys, often become desperately discouraged in their efforts to find employment other than domestic or personal service. Highschool girls of refined appearance, after looking for weeks, will find nothing open to them in department stores, office buildings, or manufacturing establishments, save a few positions as maids placed in the women’s waiting rooms. Such girls find it continually assumed by the employment agencies to whom they apply for positions that they are willing to serve as domestics in low-class hotels and disreputable houses. Of course the agency does not explain the character of the place to which it sends the girl, but going to one address after another the girl herself finds that the places are all of one kind.

Recently an intelligent colored girl who had kept a careful record of her experiences with three employment agencies came to the office of the Juvenile Protective Association to see what might be done to protect colored girls less experienced and self-reliant than herself against similar temptations. Another young colored girl who, at the age of fifteen, had been sent to a house of prostitution by an employment agency, was rescued from the house, treated in a hospital and sent to her sister in a western state. She there married a respectable man and is now living in a little home “almost paid for.”

The case of Eliza M., who has worked as cook in a disreputable house for ten years, is that of a woman forced into vicious surroundings. In addition to her wages of five dollars a week and food which she is permitted to take home every evening to her family, she has been able to save her generous “tips” for the education of her three children for whom she is very ambitious.

Colored young women who are manicurists and hair dressers find it continually assumed that they will be willing to go to hotels under compromising conditions and when a decent girl refuses to go, she is told that that is all that she can expect. There is no doubt that the few colored girls who find positions as stenographers or bookkeepers are much more open to insult than white girls in similar positions.

All these experiences tend to discourage the young people from that “education” which their parents so eagerly desire for them and also makes it extremely difficult for them to maintain their standards of self-respect.

In spite of various efforts on the part of colored people themselves to found homes for dependent and semi-delinquent colored children the accommodations are totally inadequate, which is the more remarkable as the public records all give a high percentage of negro criminals. In Chicago the police department gives 7.7 per cent., the Juvenile Court 6.5 per cent., the county jail 10 per cent.

Those familiar with the police and the courts believe that negroes are often arrested on excuses too flimsy to hold a white man, that any negro who happens to be near the scene of a crime or disorder is promptly arrested and often convicted on evidence upon which a white man would be discharged. Certainly the Juvenile Protective Association has on record cases in which a negro has been arrested without sufficient cause and convicted on inadequate evidence. A certain type of policeman, of juryman, and of prosecuting attorney has apparently no scruples in sending a “nigger up the road” on mere suspicion.

There is the record in the files of the Association of the case of George W., a colored boy, nineteen years old, who was born in Chicago and who had attended the public schools through one year at high school. He lived with his mother and had worked steadily for three years as a porter in a large grocery store, when one day he was arrested on a charge of rape.

In the late afternoon of that day a woman eighty-three years old was assaulted by a negro and was saved from the horrible attack only by the timely arrival of her daughter, who so frightened the assailant that he jumped out of a window. Two days later George was arrested, charged with the crime. At the police station he was not allowed to sleep, was beaten, cuffed and kicked, and finally, battered and frightened, he confessed that he had committed the crime.

When he appeared in court, his lawyer advised him to plead guilty, although the boy explained that he had not committed the crime and had confessed simply because he was forced to do so. The evidence against him was so flimsy that the judge referred to it in his instructions to the jury. The state’s attorney had failed to establish the ownership of the cap dropped by the fleeing assailant and the time of the attempted act was changed during the testimony. The description given by the people who saw the colored man running away did not correspond to George’s appearance. Nevertheless the jury brought in a verdict of guilty and the judge sentenced the boy to fourteen years in the penitentiary. When one of the men who had seen the guilty man running away from the old woman’s house was asked why he did not make his testimony more explicit, he replied, “Oh, well, he’s only a nigger anyway.”

The case was brought to the Juvenile Protective Association by the employer of George W., who, convinced of the boy’s good character, felt that he had not had a fair trial. The Association, finding that the boy could absolutely prove an alibi at the time of the crime, is making every effort to get him out of the penitentiary.

As remedies against the unjust discrimination against the colored man suspected of crime, a leading attorney of the race in Chicago suggests that:

Generalizing against the negro should cease. The fact that one negro is bad should not fix criminality upon the race. The race should be judged by its best as well as by its worst types.

The public press never associates the nationality of a criminal so markedly in its account of crime as in the case of a negro. This exception is most unjust and harmful and should not obtain.

The negro should not be made the universal scapegoat. When a crime is committed, the slightest pretext starts the rumor of a “negro suspect” and flaming headlines prejudice the public mind long after the white criminal is found.

The investigators were convinced that there are not enough places in Chicago where negro children may find wholesome amusement. Of the fifteen small parks and playgrounds with field houses, only two are really utilized by colored children. They avoid the others because of friction and difficulty which they constantly encounter with white children. The commercial amusements found in the neighborhoods of colored people are the lowest type of poolrooms and saloons, which are disproportionately numerous because so many young colored men find their first employment in these two occupations, and with their experience and very little capital are able to start places for themselves.

All colored people are especially fond of music, but almost the only outlet the young people find for their musical taste is in vaudeville shows, amusement parks, and inferior types of theaters. That which should be a great source of inspiration tends to pull them down, as their love of pleasure, lacking innocent expression, draws them toward the vice districts where alone the color line disappears.

An effort was recently made by some colored people on the South Side to start a model dance hall. The white people of the vicinity, assuming that it would be an objectionable place, successfully opposed it as a public nuisance and this effort toward better recreational facilities had to be abandoned.

In suggesting remedies for this state of affairs, the broken family life, the surroundings of a vicious neighborhood, the dearth of adequate employment, the lack of preventive institutional care and proper recreation for negro youth, the Juvenile Protective Association finds itself confronted with the situation stated at the beginning of the investigation—that the life of the colored boy and girl is so circumscribed on every hand by race limitations that they can be helped only as the entire colored population in Chicago is understood and fairly treated.

For many years Chicago, keeping to the tradition of its early history, had the reputation among colored people of according them fair treatment. Even now it is free from the outward signs of “segregation,” but unless the city realizes more fully than it does at present the great injustice which discrimination against any class of citizens entails, it will suffer for this indifference in an ever-increasing number of idle and criminal youths, which must eventually vitiate both the black and white citizenship of Chicago.

Of the local work of women’s associations in behalf of better opportunities for the alien, the reports are too numerous for the barest mention. Only an example or two may be cited by way of illustration. Pittsburgh, the city second to Chicago as a distributing center for immigrants, has many individuals and organizations alive to the problem of assimilation. The Y. M. C. A. and the Civic Club of Allegheny County have coÖperated to establish a foreign immigration distributing station at the railway depot and will do follow-up work with the new residents of that city. In this work these two organizations will have the coÖperation of the Council of Jewish Women and other important social agencies in the city.

The Education Committee of the Civic Club arranged conferences in Pittsburgh on the Americanization of foreign-born families, frankly accepting Miss Kellor’s program: “The State should take up, at the point where the Federal government lays aside its responsibility, the real question of immigration, which is the problem of making the immigrant into a good citizen, protecting him when he is looking for a job and helping him to go to the part of the state where he is most needed, where the best conditions exist, where there is the best standard of living and where he may find congenial associates.”

Evening classes for foreigners were also undertaken by this club, and its women members worked hard at that enterprise until the Board of Education decided to assume responsibility for it.

All over the state of Pennsylvania thoughtful women are turning seriously to the question of the alien in their midst. The American Club Woman reports that “the immigration problem is regarded as very important by Mrs. Samuel Semple, State President of Pennsylvania Clubs. She has traveled all over the state and observed the vast throngs of foreign immigrants pouring into the industries. She urges a special effort to educate the immigrant into a good citizen. The establishment of social centers in the schools is the first step advocated.” “Women inspectors at every port where immigrants land is a much needed reform. The Civic Club of Philadelphia has made a study of immigrant stations and finds that there is no adequate provision for the proper handling of women and children, and that no privacy is allowed, and that women are frequently subjected to embarrassment and distress because of being entirely at the mercy of male inspectors.”

In Boston, the Women’s Municipal League is a center for all agencies, including that of the League, which are working for the assimilation of the foreign elements in the community. We are told that “it has also reached the point when it can develop, within the League, a plan to unify all the educational activities of every department until no vital interest in home or school or social life is left untouched; a plan which shall include the emigrant woman and thus become the basis of a genuine democracy.”

In California, the women like many men are beginning to wrestle with the immigration problem, which has been augmented already by the opening of the Panama Canal and which will, unless proper safeguards are at once set up, produce the evil conditions in the western seaports and western cities that now exist in the eastern ports and other cities.

The Women’s Civic League of Baltimore has made a serious effort to secure adequate protection for the immigrants that come in such numbers to that city.

The Women’s Municipal League of New York formed in 1906 a Research Committee which made an intensive study of a group of immigrants and reported the need of better public protection. As a result of the pressure exerted by this Committee, the League itself, and the Association of Neighborhood Workers, a state immigration bill was passed in 1908 creating a non-salaried commission of nine members. Miss Frances Kellor, who had directed the research work among immigrants, was made a member of this commission and later became head of the State Bureau of Immigration.

Massachusetts followed with a Commission of Immigration on the lines of the New York commission, for a study of internal assimilation. Grace Abbott, director of the Immigrants’ Protective League of Chicago, was appointed executive secretary.

Governor Johnson recently appointed a similar commission in California and Mrs. Mary E. Gibson is an active member.

Of the work of Jane Addams of Chicago in the foreign colonies the very best tribute is that paid her by one of her alien neighbors: “It was that word with from Jane Addams,” said a working woman, “that took the bitterness out of my life. For if she wanted to work with me and I could work with her, it gave my life new meaning and hope.”

Starting in with a simple desire for service to our new citizens, sometimes enlivened by real missionary fervor and again by a semi-religious and philanthropic sentiment, women social workers are now realizing to a gratifying extent that the real basis of assimilation is economic, because the immigrant comes here as a worker. To prevent exploitation thus becomes the main endeavor of a large group of workers in the foreign colonies, and their emphasis on good wages as a basis for housing reform and other standards of living as well as for social opportunity and culture proves the capacity of women for intellectual growth and keenness of penetration. Sometimes in their anxiety to make good citizens of foreigners, women workers among them, or for them, lay emphasis on governmental action and are paternalistic in that they work for legislation more than education among the workers themselves. Others, while not underestimating the value of legislation, feel that exploitation will be more permanently removed or prevented by educating the immigrant to demand those conditions of life and labor for himself or herself which will make exploitation impossible.