Adventures in Contentment

Whether there can be a real democracy (as in a city) where there is not that elbow knowledge, that close neighbourhood sympathy, that conscious surrender of little personal goods for bigger public ones, I don't know. We haven't many foreigners in our district, but all three were there on the night we voted for the addition. They are Polish. Each has a farm where the whole family works--and puts on a little more Americanism each year. They're good people. It is surprising how much all these Poles, Italians, Germans and others, are like us, how perfectly human they are, when we know them personally! One Pole here, named Kausky, I have come to know pretty well, and I declare I have forgotten that he is a Pole. There's nothing like the rub of democracy! The reason why we are so suspicious of the foreigners in our cities is that they are crowded together in such vast, unknown, undigested masses. We have swallowed them too fast, and we suffer from a sort of national dyspepsia. Here in the country we promptly digest our foreigners and they make as good Americans as anybody. "Catch a foreigner when he first comes here," says Charles Baxter, "and he takes to our politics like a fish to water." The Scotch Preacher says they "gape for education," And when I see Kausky's six children going by in the morning to school, all their round, sleepy, fat faces shining with soap, I believe it! Baxter tells with humour how he persuaded Kausky to vote for the addition to the schoolhouse. It was a pretty stiff tax for the poor fellow to pay, but Baxter "figgered children with him," as he said. With six to educate, Baxter showed him that he was actually getting a good deal more than he paid for!