cord the same recognition to social statistics that they give to business statistics, pointing out at the same time that our general social progress, as well as our business progress, depends to a very large extent on how clear an understanding we have of our social disorders and the forces needed to check them. Second, let us have a well-understood philosophy underlying our efforts at social reconstruction; let us clearly define our sociological objectives, and create the statistical instruments to chart the course as well as measure the effects of our social endeavors. Third, let the private national organizations in cooperation with state and national government authorities devise complete standardized statistical systems which will contain the minimum amount of social data required for comprehensive understanding of the problem involved, make provision for such additional inquiries as seem to be required by a particular institution or state, keeping always in mind that the data to be obtained should be in such form as will permit its ready correlation with data in related fields of social endeavors. Fourth, let the large national organizations continue and increase their efforts to have an ever larger number of institutions and agencies adopt the standard statistical reporting system, with the ultimate aim of including all the institutions and agencies in the field. Fifth, let the United States Census Bureau create a division of social statistics, to act as the statistical planning board and be the national clearing house, coordinating all our efforts in gathering and issuing social statistics.

PROPOSED MEASURES FOR IMPROVING THE CARE
OF THE AGED IN MASSACHUSETTS

Richard K. Conant, Massachusetts Commissioner of Public
Welfare, Boston

A Commission on Old Age Pensions has for two years been studying our system of caring for the aged in Massachusetts. Its report is a most valuable statistical study and shows a widespread lack of means in old age, emphasizing the sinister dread of poverty which is experienced by many good people. The commission disagreed as to the remedy and reported a majority bill and a minority bill, neither of which, in my opinion, would accomplish much toward preventing poverty or toward removing the dread of poverty in old age. The pension bill proposed by the majority, giving a dollar a day to those who have incomes less than that amount and who have not children able to support them, is really not a pension. It is relief for the poor. Poverty must be shown in order to secure it. It is hedged around with an investigation of need, and it is reduced by the ability of children to support. It is really poor relief under another name. In Massachusetts a real pension for all citizens over sixty-five, even if it were only a dollar a day, would amount to $60,000,000 a year. No state could afford a real old age pension under our present scheme of government.

Nor does the bill proposed by the minority of the commission, modeled on

our mothers' aid law, do much to prevent poverty or to relieve the dread of poverty. The minority bill attempts to increase the amount of aid which is being given to those who already have become dependent. The inadequacy of poor relief in Massachusetts in 1913 was sufficient justification for the state setting up a system of mothers' aid with state supervision of the local city or town overseers and a state subsidy. The report gives no evidence of any such inadequacy at the present time in the care of the aged. The effect of the mothers' aid law has been to increase the standards of adequacy in all poor relief, so that now the care which is given to aged persons in Massachusetts is reasonably adequate and is constantly being made more and more adequate. The commission's report discloses no great evil in this respect. People are not going to dread poverty in old age any less if the overseers of the poor give more aid to the people who have become dependent. The bill might add a thousand to the 3,791 persons who are at present in receipt of public relief. To add a thousand people to the overseers' lists will not improve the condition nor the state of mind of the 18,000 people whom the report shows to have yearly incomes of less than $300 and who cannot adequately be supported by their children. The minority bill attempts to do away with the pauperizing, as it says, of persons over seventy years of age. How about those between sixty and seventy, and those between fifty and sixty? Is there any use in beginning to do away with pauperization at the age of seventy? Will you pauperize a man up to the age of seventy and then expect to depauperize him? The minority bill says that persons over seventy shall not be sent to almshouses. Will you send them to almshouses up to the time they are seventy and then take them out at the age of seventy? The minority bill attempts to give suitable and dignified care to a person when he gets to be seventy. Why wait until a person is seventy before giving him suitable and dignified care?

The remedy for the real evil which the commission's report shows (such extreme dread of poverty as still remains) is, I believe, to be found in a continuance of our progress in making relief both sufficient and humane. We must entirely abolish the old idea, already largely abolished, of treating a dependent person as a pauper. The old practice, the old words, the old attitude, all constitute the evil which modern measures try to abolish. For the last six years I have stricken the word "pauper" from every one of our hundreds of departmental forms which has come up for reprinting. We need an amendment to our statutes which will entirely eliminate the word "pauper." It is an obsolete word except in the law.

The majority bill would set up a new system of district boards in place of local overseers of the poor. I do not believe that we need such a system in Massachusetts. Two years ago several boards of overseers desired to change their names and I suggested that a permissive law be enacted allowing any city or town to change the name to "board of public welfare." Nineteen cities and eleven towns have now changed the name. Each one which has tried the new

name likes it better than the old one. With the reforms of the last fifteen years a new attitude has almost entirely replaced the old attitude, and the change of name expresses and registers the change in attitude. We need an amendment to our law requiring all cities and towns to change to the new name.

We need also to change the word "almshouse" to "hospital." Our almshouses today are used almost wholly for sick persons. We do, in most cases, just what the minority bill, in section 2, would have us do: "Give aid in the home or at some other suitable place, and not in an almshouse unless the person is ill." The institutions have ceased to be houses for almsgiving. They have become hospitals for persons too sick to take care of themselves outside an institution. Several of these institutions are already called hospitals. For instance, in Lowell the almshouse is called the Chelmsford Street Hospital; in Boston, the Long Island Hospital; and in Lawrence, the Lawrence General Hospital. In the almshouses today there are 188 nurses and approximately 866 beds, which are known as hospital beds. Today nearly all the patients in the almshouses are within the category of hospital patients. The change in name would not immediately demand any change in the institution equipment or structure, but it would help in the constant progress which we are making toward getting better hospital care in the almshouses. This year, for example, Mr. Francis Bardwell, our expert on the care of the aged, has induced four cities to make considerable changes in their almshouses to make them hospitals for chronic care. These changes would be more than verbal changes in effect. They would, I believe, greatly influence the attitude of all who deal with poor persons and the attitude of the whole community, so that substantial progress would be made in wiping out the dread of poverty.

I have one more change to recommend: a substantive change to prevent poverty, to help those who are on the way down to poverty. I would add to our present law, which provides that towns shall relieve persons in distress, a new provision that they may in their discretion aid a needy person even when he owns property. That is our policy under our mothers' aid law. The fact that the person aided owns the equity in her small home or has a small amount of cash (up to $200 under our rule) does not bar the aid. It is not necessary to wait until the wolf crosses the threshold. It is better to meet him outside the door. The minority bill of the old age pension commission would, I suppose, allow this in the case of persons over seventy years of age. The proper time to give aid in the prevention of destitution is not at the age of seventy, but long before the age of seventy.

If we could make these four changes in the statutes: strike out the word "pauper," change the name "overseers of the poor" to "board of public welfare," change the word "almshouse" to "hospital," and give aid to needy persons even though they have some property, I believe that we would have done something toward preventing poverty, and that we would be doing a great deal toward eliminating the unnecessary dread of poverty.

X. THE IMMIGRANT

FEDERAL IMMIGRATION LEGISLATION AND

ITS ADMINISTRATION

J. A. Fluckey, Inspector in Charge, United States Immigration
Service, Cleveland

Immigration legislation.-Early legislation related principally to immigration statistics, of which there is some record as far back as 1820. Restrictive measures did not begin to appear upon the statute books in a material way until about 1891, and it was not until then that persons suffering from a loathsome or dangerous contagious disease were debarred from the United States. Feebleminded persons, epileptics, and persons afflicted with tuberculosis were not excluded by legislation until 1907; Chinese laborers were first excluded in 1882; other Asiatics were not embraced within the excluded classes until 1917; and the Japanese, by the aid of the so-called "Gentlemen's Agreement," were able to resist exclusion by statute until the passage of the immigration act of 1924.

In all earlier legislation the principle was that any might enter whom the government did not specifically debar, and the burden was not fully and finally placed upon the immigrant to show his mental, moral, and physical fitness to enter until the passage of the last-named act, barely two years ago. You are all familiar with the tidal waves of immigration, how they rose and fell at various times during the past century, in a remarkably close parallel to the respective tides of prosperity and depression. You are also aware that the earlier immigration, as well as the colonial population, came from the north and west of Europe; that the heavy influx of immigrants from Russia and Central and Southern Europe did not set in until the late nineties; that approximately a quarter of a million people each from the countries of Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Italy arrived in the high tides of 1907 and 1913; and that the immigration from all of these countries was stopped during the war period. Subsequent to the war there was a great rush to get away from the debt-ridden, unstabilized, and disorganized countries of Europe, as well as the British Isles; and with some five millions of unemployed in the United States, Congress turned its attention to the problem of the restricting of immigration. Thus was enacted in May, 1921, the so-called "quota law," limiting immigration from the various countries to 3 per cent of the nationals of such countries within the United States in 1910, according to the census for that year. The law was enacted hastily, and there resulted much confusion and opportunity for an unprecedented and undreamed of exploitation of immigrants. Steamship lines brought to our ports

thousands in excess of the quotas, and, by racing to port and jockeying to position to cross the deadlines on the stroke of twelve at the beginning of a new month, would flood the immigrant stations with hordes of inadmissible aliens. While this law materially reduced immigration and served the purpose for the time being, as illustrated by the boy in the story who held his finger in the hole in the dyke wall, it led to further study by Congress, and the enactment, on May 26, 1924, of the act reducing the respective quotas to 2 per cent of the nationals of each country according to the 1890 census, which effected a reduction in the number of immigrants admitted from about 706,000, in 1924, to approximately 294,000, in 1925 (i.e., for the fiscal year ending June 30).

One of the serious problems which confronts our country today is that pertaining to the smuggling of aliens into the United States. This is accomplished in many ways. Aliens who have been members of the crews of vessels often leave their ships as deserters, and at times with the collusion of officers; others have gone to Cuba and entered along the coasts of Florida from fishing smacks or other small vessels; many have gained entry over the land boundary between Mexico and the United States; while others, in very large numbers, have crossed the border from Canada. As we at Cleveland are located more nearly to the places of seemingly greatest vulnerability, that is, the Niagara frontier and the Detroit and St. Clair River regions, it is obvious that the greater number of smuggled aliens with whom we have dealt personally have been those who came through the latter avenues of entry. Others, especially if they speak English, succeed in passing the border officers by claiming to be persons coming for a brief visit, but, once on the Yankee side of the line, make straight for some industrial center and remain there until uprooted by the toe of Uncle Sam's boot, and then place every possible obstacle in the way of a speedy removal from the United States by such means as the destruction of their passports or evidences of nationality and the giving of unreliable data as to their identity. Strange to say, aliens who gain entry illegally are nearly always found at work, and very often they enlist the sympathy and assistance of their American employers to avoid deportation, although native and naturalized citizens and aliens legally within the United States may be found unemployed in the same community.

While it may be found expedient to extend some consideration in the way of legalizing the entries of persons who came into the country in a bona fide way, but without inspection, prior to the establishment of the present requirements, it is inconceivable that the bars should be thrown down to the thousands who have entered surreptitiously, or by means of one subterfuge or another, and now seek to remain and become members of our great population. The alien who came to our borders with a lie in his mouth, or who sneaked by the outposts set for the protection of our citizens, has no place with us, and the sooner he departs the better for all concerned.

Some acute social problems.-During the years of my service many of the present laws dealing with social vices have been placed upon the statute books.