questioned a man standing at the door of a tenement: "What can
you tell me of this neighborhood?""You have come to the right
man," was the answer. "I have lived here longer than any one
else.""And how long may that be?""Three years." When the
corner-stone of the new buildings of Union Theological Seminary
was laid on Lenox Hill in 1884, Dr. Hitchcock, then president, con-
gratulated the institution on having at last acquired a permanent
home. To-day not one stone of the old buildings remains upon
another. The eternity to which the eloquent speaker looked for-
ward was in fact less than thirty years.

The difficulty which results from this incessant change is mag-
nified by the character of the units which are changing. From the
first, different strands have entered into the making of the American
people, and in recent years the complexity of our population has
enormously increased. Immigration has been pouring into the coun-
try year by year streams of people, ignorant of our language, our
traditions, and our ideals, attracted to us by the promise of
higher wages, greater comfort; but, above all, larger freedom. At
first drawn largely from the British Isles and central Europe, they
now come from Russia and the Balkans, as well as from the Near
and the Far East. Calling upon the Protestant pastor at Baalbek
in Syria twenty years ago I was accosted in good English by the wife
of the local Greek priest. She had spent five years in New York as
a peddler on the lower East Side, and she was expecting to return.
It was a hope that seemed in every one's mind. The man who drove
my camel in Egypt begged me to take him back to America, "the
land of unlimited possibilities."

With the consequences of this migration of the peoples we are
only too familiar. Foreign cities have been growing up in the heart
of America, preserving in language, customs, and ideals the habits
of the country from which they came. New York has its Ghetto,
its Little Italy, its Chinatown, its Bohemia, its Hungary. It has
its Greek coffee-houses, and its Syrian restaurants where the new-
comer may fraternize with men from his own country. In
Harlem, which was yesterday a white man's city, one hundred
thousand Negroes now make their homes. It is the same on a
lesser scale the country over. A single ward of San Francisco con-
tains thirty thousand Italians. In New Britain, Connecticut, a city
of forty thousand people, twenty-six different languages are spoken.

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