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  THE OLD WORLD
  IN THE NEW

[Illustration: Towards the New World]




  THE OLD WORLD
  IN THE NEW

  THE SIGNIFICANCE OF PAST AND PRESENT
  IMMIGRATION TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE

  BY

  EDWARD ALSWORTH ROSS, PH.D., LL.D.

  Professor of Sociology in the University of Wisconsin
  Author of "Social Control," "Social Psychology,"
  "The Changing Chinese," "Changing
  America," Etc.

  ILLUSTRATED WITH
  MANY PHOTOGRAPHS

  [Illustration: logo]

  NEW YORK
  THE CENTURY CO.
  1914




  Copyright, 1913, 1914, by
  THE CENTURY CO.


  _Published, October, 1914_




PREFACE


"Immigration," said to me a distinguished social worker and
idealist, "is a wind that blows democratic ideas throughout the
world. In a Siberian hut from which four sons had gone forth to
America to seek their fortune, I saw tacked up a portrait of Lincoln
cut from a New York newspaper. Even there they knew what Lincoln
stood for and loved him. The return flow of letters and people
from this country is sending an electric thrill through dwarfed,
despairing sections of humanity. The money and leaders that come
back to these down-trodden peoples inspire in them a great impulse
toward liberty and democracy and progress. Time-hallowed Old-World
oppressions and exploitations that might have lasted for generations
will perish in our time, thanks to the diffusion by immigrants of
American ideas of freedom and opportunity."

Rapt in these visions of benefit to belated humanity, my friend
refused to consider any possible harm of immigration to this
country. He did not doubt it so much as ignore it. How should the
well-being of a nation be balanced against a blessing to humanity?

"Think what American chances mean to these poor people!" urged a
large-hearted woman in settlement work. "Thousands make shipwreck,
other thousands are disappointed, but tens of thousands do realize
something of the better, larger life they had dreamed of. Who would
exclude any of them if he but knew what a land of promise America
is to the poor of other lands?" Her sympathy with the visible alien
at the gate was so keen that she had no feeling for the invisible
children of _our_ poor, who will find the chances gone, nor for
those at the gate of the To-be, who might have been born, but will
not be.

I am not of those who consider humanity and forget the nation, who
pity the living but not the unborn. To me, those who are to come
after us stretch forth beseeching hands as well as the masses on the
other side of the globe. Nor do I regard America as something to be
spent quickly and cheerfully for the benefit of pent-up millions in
the backward lands. What if we become crowded without their ceasing
to be so? I regard it as a nation whose future may be of unspeakable
value to the rest of mankind, provided that the easier conditions
of life here be made permanent by high standards of living,
institutions and ideals, which finally may be appropriated by all
men. We could have helped the Chinese a little by letting their
surplus millions swarm in upon us a generation ago; but we have
helped them infinitely more by protecting our standards and having
something worth their copying when the time came.

  EDWARD ALSWORTH ROSS.

  The University of Wisconsin,
  Madison, Wisconsin,
  September, 1914.




CONTENTS


  CHAPTER I

                                                                  PAGE

  THE ORIGINAL MAKE-UP OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE                        3

  Traits of the Puritan stock--Elements in the peopling
  of Virginia--The indentured servants and convicts--Purification
  by free land--The Huguenots--The Germans--The Scotch-Irish--
  Ruling motives in the peopling of the New World--Selective
  agencies--The toll of the sea--The sifting by the wilderness--
  The impress of the frontier--How an American Breed arose--Its
  traits.


  CHAPTER II

  THE CELTIC IRISH                                                  24

  The great lull--The Hibernian tide--Why it has run low--Effects
  on Ireland--Irish-Americans in the struggle for existence--Their
  improvidence and unthrift--Why they lacked the economic virtues--
  Drink their worst foe--Their small criminality--Loyalty to wife
  and child--Their occupational preferences--Their rapid rise--Their
  rank in intellectual contribution--Celtic traits--Place of the
  Irish in American society.


  CHAPTER III

  THE GERMANS                                                       46

  Volume and causes of the German freshet--Why it has
  ceased--Distribution of the Germans in America--_Deutschtum_
  vs. assimilation--The "Forty-eighters"--Influence
  of the Germans on our farming, on our drinking,
  on our attitude toward recreation--Political tendencies
  of German voters--The Germans as pathbreakers
  for intellectual liberty--Their success in the struggle for
  existence--Moderation in alcoholism and in crime--Preferred
  occupations--Teutonic traits--Effect of the German
  infusion on the temper of the American people.


  CHAPTER IV

  THE SCANDINAVIANS                                                 7

  The size of the Scandinavian wave--Distribution of this
  element in the United States--Social characteristics--Crime
  and alcoholism--Occupational choices--Readiness of assimilation--
  Reaction to America--National contrasts among Scandinavians--
  Intellectual rating--Race traits--Moral and political
  significance of the Scandinavians.


  CHAPTER V

  THE ITALIANS                                                      95

  Causes of the Italian outflow--Distribution of Italians--Social
  characteristics--Broad contrast between North Italians and South
  Italians--Occupations--Agricultural settlements--Freedom from
  alcoholism--Gaming--Addiction to violence--Camorra and Mafia in
  America--Difficulties in dealing with Italian immigrants--Their
  mental rating--Traits of character--The Italians as a social
  element.


  CHAPTER VI

  THE SLAVS                                                        120

  Place of the Slavs in history--Lateness of their awakening--Size
  of the Slav groups in America--Occupational tendencies of the
  Slavic immigrants--Distribution--Alcoholism--Criminality--
  Subjection of women--Extraordinary fecundity--Displacement of
  other elements--Resistance to Americanization--Clannishness--
  Social characteristics of Slav settlements--Industrial
  segregation--Mental rating--Prospects of Slavic immigration.


  CHAPTER VII

  THE EAST EUROPEAN HEBREWS                                        143

  One-fifth of the Hebrew race in America--"The Promised
  Land"--Hebrew interest in free immigration--Waves
  of Russo-Hebrew immigration--Occupational preferences--Morals--
  Crime--Race traits--Intellectuality--Persistence of will--Growth
  of Anti-Semitism in America--Causes--Prospects--Why America is
  a powerful solvent of Judaism--Signs of Assimilation.


  CHAPTER VIII

  THE LESSER IMMIGRANT GROUPS                                      168

  African, Saracen and Mongolian blood in our immigrants--The
  Finns--Motives and characteristics--Political
  aptitude--Patriotism--The Magyars--Social condition
  and traits--The Portuguese--Origin and volume of the
  Portuguese influx--Distribution--Industrial and social
  characteristics--Resistance to assimilation--The Greeks--
  Immigrationfrom Greece purely economic--Distribution
  and occupational preferences--Serfdom of Greek
  bootblacks--The Levantines--Racial and social characteristics.


  CHAPTER IX

  ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF IMMIGRATION                               195

  Stimulators of migration--The commercial interests behind
  the movement--The new immigrant as an industrial
  tool--How tariff protection coupled with the open
  door augment the manufacturer's profits--Effect of the
  new immigration upon the cost of living, upon agricultural
  methods--Shall the penniless immigrant be helped
  to get upon the land--The utilization of foreign labor
  to break strikes--The foreign laborer as a hindrance to
  unionism--Effect upon wages and conditions--Is the
  foreigner indispensable--Immigrant women doing men's
  work--Fate of the displaced American--Immigration and
  crises--The inevitable rise of social pressure--Who bears
  the brunt?


  CHAPTER X

  SOCIAL EFFECTS OF IMMIGRATION                                    228

  Immigration and social atavism--Community reversions
  to the Middle Ages--Immigrant illiteracy and ignorance--New
  readers of the yellow press--The spread of white
  peonage--Caste cleavage--Attitude of the foreign-born
  toward the claims of women--Split-family immigration
  and the social evil--How immigration makes acute the
  housing problem--Why overgrown cities--Immigrants
  who discount our charities--The wayward child of the
  immigrant--Insanity among the foreign-born--Obstructions
  to the operation of the public school--Signs of
  social decline--Peasantism vs. social progress.


  CHAPTER XI

  IMMIGRANTS IN POLITICS                                           259

  The Hibernian domination of Northern cities--Political
  psychology of the Celts--Practical consequences--Immigration
  as foe to party traditionalism--Citizenship of
  the new immigrants compared with the old--Accumulation
  of voteless men--How this lessens the political
  strength of labor--Psychology of the ignorant naturalized
  immigrants--How the cunning boss acquires "influence"--Feudal
  relation between the boss and his humble
  constituents--Naturalization frauds--The Tammany way--The
  political machine--The liquor interest and the foreign-born
  voter--The foreign press in politics--The cost
  of losing political like-mindedness--Political mysticism
  vs. common sense.


  CHAPTER XII

  AMERICAN BLOOD AND IMMIGRANT BLOOD                               282

  Submergence of the pioneering breed--Growing heterogeneity--
  Primitive types among the foreign-born--How immigration will
  affect good looks in this country--Effect of crossing on
  personal beauty--Stature and physique of the newer immigrants--
  Do they revitalize the American people--Race morals of the
  South European stocks--Are the immigrants good samples of their
  own people--Appraisal of the different ethnic strains in the
  American people--Rating of present immigrant streams--How
  immigration has affected the fecundity of Americans--Evading
  a degrading competition by race suicide--The triumph of the
  low-standard elements over the high-standard elements.

  APPENDIX                                                         307

  INDEX                                                            321




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


                                                                  PAGE

  Towards the New World      _Frontispiece_

  Immigrant Women in Line for Inspection at Ellis Island             6

  Slovaks, Ellis Island                                             15

  Distribution of Irish and Natives of Irish Parentage--1910        38

  Distribution of Germans and Natives of German Parentage--1910     55

  Distribution of Scandinavians and Natives of Scandinavian
    Parentage--1910                                                 78

  Typical Norwegian Boy                                             87

  Typical Swedish Girl                                              87

  Distribution of Italians and natives of Italian Parentage--1910   94

  Italian Gypsy Mother and Child                                   100

  Italian Woman of Greek or Albanian Ancestry                      100

  Group of Italian Immigrants Lunching in Old Railroad Waiting
    Room, Ellis Island                                             109

  Board of Special Inquiry, Ellis Island                           115

  Utter Weariness--Bohemian Woman on East Side, New York,
    after the Day's Work                                           115

  Slav Sisters                                                     122

  Slovak Girl                                                      122

  Slav Woman and Italian Husband                                   131

  Slovak Girls                                                     131

  Russian Jews, Ellis Island                                       142

  Hindoo Immigrants                                                142

  Slovak Woman and Jewish Man, Ellis Island                        151

  Jewish Girl in Chicago Sweat-Shop                                151

  Jewish Runner Soliciting Immigrants for the Steamship Company    162

  Magyar                                                           171

  Croatian                                                         171

  Roumanian                                                        171

  Croatians Celebrating Their Going Home to the "Old Country"      178

  Roumanian Couple in Gala Attire, Youngstown, Ohio                178

  Magyar Peasant Woman                                             186

  Molokan from Russia                                              186

  A Finnish Woman by Her Cabin of Hewn Logs in Northern
    Wisconsin near Lake Superior                                   191

  Some of Syracuse's Newer Citizens--A Greek and Two Turks         191

  Sunday Group of Roumanian Steel Workers, Youngstown,
    Ohio                                                           199

  Sunday Roumanians, Youngstown, Ohio                              199

  The Unemployed--Middle of the Morning, Chicago                   206

  "Shack" of a Polish Iron Miner, Hibbing, Minn.                   211

  Cabin of an Austrian Iron Miner, Virginia, Minn.                 211

  Immigrant Girls Coming to Work in the Early Morning at
    the Union Stockyards                                           217

  Polish Girls Washing Dishes Under the Sidewalk in a Chicago
    Restaurant                                                     217

  Roumanian Shepherds in Native Costume, Ellis Island              224

  Distribution of Foreign-born Whites in the United States--1910   241

  Dependent Italian Family, Cleveland                              248

  Dependent Slovak Family, Cleveland                               248

  Italian Men's Civic Club, Rochester, N. Y.                       257

  A Civic Banquet to "New Citizens," July 4th                      268

  Y. M. C. A. Class of Slovenes in English Visiting a Session of
    the City Council of Cleveland                                  277

  Class of Foreign-born Women (Carinthians) at the Cleveland
    Hardware Co., Cleveland, O., Meeting for Instruction
    in English in the Factory, Twice a Week from 5 to 6.30         277

  Distribution of Foreign Stock in the United States--1910         284

  Distribution of Native White Stock in the United States--1910    301




  THE OLD WORLD IN
  THE NEW




THE OLD WORLD IN THE NEW




CHAPTER I

THE ORIGINAL MAKE-UP OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE


"God sifted a whole nation that He might send choice grain into the
wilderness." So thought the seventeenth century of the migration
to Massachusetts Bay in the evil years of Charles I; but what are
_we_ to think of it? There is to-day so little sympathy with that
remote, narrow New England theocracy that it is well to state again
in living terms what part the coming of the best of the English
Puritans bore in building up the American people.

As history makers, those who will suffer loss and exile rather than
give up an ideal that has somehow taken hold of them are well nigh
as unlike ordinary folk as if they had dropped from Mars. In every
generation those who are capable of heroic devotion to any ideal
whatsoever are only a remnant. Nine persons out of ten incline to
the line of least resistance or of greatest profit, and will no more
sacrifice themselves for an ideal than lead will turn to a magnet.

That the ideal should be final is of small consequence. It matters
little whether it is a religious tenet, a mode of worship, a
method of life, or a state of society. The essential thing is
that it stands apart from the appetites, passions, and petty aims
that govern most of us. Those who will face panther and tomahawk
for the sake of their ideal are not to be swayed by the sordid
motives and fitful passions that lord it over commonplace lives.
Holding themselves to be instruments for the fulfilment of some
larger purpose, men of this type make their mark upon the world.
The fathers dedicate themselves to establishing godliness in the
community. Their posterity fly to arms in behalf of the principle of
"No taxation without representation." _Their_ posterity, in turn,
war upon the liquor traffic, slavery, or imperialism. As surely as
one quarter of us are still of the blood of the twenty thousand
Puritans who sought the wilderness between 1618 and 1640, so surely
are there ideals not yet risen above the horizon that will inspire
Americans in the generations to come.

The Dutch settled New Amsterdam from practical motives, although
some of them were Walloons fleeing oppression in the Spanish
Netherlands. Gain prompted the peopling of Virginia, and that
colony received its share of human chaff. The Council of Virginia
early complained that "it hurteth to suffer Parents to disburden
themselves of lascivious sonnes, masters of bad servants and wives
of ill husbands, and so clogge the business with such an idle
crue, as did thrust themselves in the last voiage, that will rather
starve for hunger, than lay their hands to labor."

[Illustration: Photograph by Hine

Immigrant Women in Line for Inspection at Ellis Island]

In 1637 the collector of the port of London averred that "most of
those that go thither ordinarily have no habitation ... and are
better out than within the kingdom." After the execution of Charles
I, a number of Royalist families removed to Virginia rather than
brook the rule of Cromwell. This influx of the well-to-do registers
itself in an abrupt increase in the size of the land-grants and in
a sudden rise in the number of slaves. From this period one meets
with the names of Randolph, Madison, Monroe, Mason, Marshall,
Washington and many others that have become household words. On
the whole, however, the exodus of noble "Cavaliers" to Virginia
is a myth; for it is now generally admitted that the aristocracy
of eighteenth-century Virginia sprang chiefly from "members of
the country gentry, merchants and tradesmen and their sons and
relatives, and occasionally a minister, a physician, a lawyer, or a
captain in the merchant service," fleeing political troubles at home
or tempted by the fortunes to be made in tobacco.

Less promising was the broad substratum that sustained the
prosperity of the colony. For fifty years indentured servants
were coming in at a rate from a thousand to sixteen hundred a
year. No doubt many an enterprising wight of the English or Irish
laboring-class sold himself for a term into the tobacco-fields in
order to come within reach of beckoning Opportunity; but we know,
too, that the slums and alleys were raked for material to stock
the plantations. Hard-hearted men sold dependent kinsfolk to serve
in the colonies. Kidnappers smuggled over boys and girls gathered
from the streets of London and Bristol. About 1670, no fewer than
ten thousand persons were "spirited" from England in one year. The
Government was slow to strike at the infamous traffic, for, as was
urged in Parliament, "the plantations cannot be maintained without a
considerable number of white servants."

Dr. Johnson deemed the Americans "a race of convicts," who "ought
to be content with anything we allow them short of hanging." In the
first century of the colonies, gallows'-birds were often given the
option of servitude in the "plantations." Some prayed to be hanged
instead. In 1717 the British Government entered on the policy of
penal transportation, and thenceforth discharged certain classes of
felons upon the colonies until the Revolution made it necessary to
shunt the muddy stream to Botany Bay. New England happily escaped
these "seven-year passengers," because she would pay little for
them and because she had no tobacco to serve as a profitable return
cargo. It is estimated that between 1750 and 1770 twenty thousand
British convicts were exported to Maryland alone, so that even the
school-masters there were mostly of this stripe. The colonies
bitterly resented such cargoes, but their self-protective measures
were regularly disallowed by the selfish home government. American
scholars are coming to accept the British estimate that about 50,000
convicts were marketed on this side the water.

It is astonishing how quickly this "yellow streak" in the population
faded. No doubt the worst felons were promptly hanged, so that
those transported were such as excited the compassion of the court
in an age that recognized nearly three hundred capital offenses.
Then, too, the bulk were probably the unfortunate, or the victims
of bad surroundings, rather than born malefactors. Under the
regenerative stimulus of opportunity, many persons reformed and
became good citizens. A like purification of sewage by free land
was later witnessed in Australia. The incorrigible, when they did
not slip back to their old haunts, forsook the tide-water belt to
lead half-savage lives in the wilderness. Here they slew one another
or were strung up by "regulators," so that they bred their kind
less freely than the honest. Thus bad strains tended to run out,
and in the making of our people the criminals had no share at all
corresponding to their original numbers. Blended with the dregs from
the rest of the population, the convicts who were lazy and shiftless
rather than criminal became progenitors of the "poor whites,"
"crackers," and "sandhillers" that still cumber the poorer lands of
the southern Appalachians.


THE FRENCH HUGUENOTS

Probably no stock ever came here so gifted and prepotent as the
French Huguenots. Though only a few thousand all told, their
descendants furnished 589 of the fourteen thousand and more
Americans deemed worthy of a place in "Appletons' Cyclopedia of
American Biography." In 1790 only one-half of one per cent. of our
people bore a French name; yet this element contributed 4.2 per
cent. of the eminent names in our history, or eight times their due
quota. Like the Puritans and the Quakers, the Huguenots were of an
element that meets the test of fire and makes supreme sacrifices for
conscience' sake. They had the same affinity for ideals and the same
tenacity of character as the founders of New England, but in their
French blood they brought a sensibility, a fervor, and an artistic
endowment all their own.

It was likewise a sturdy stock, and in the early days of the
settlement it was no unusual thing for parties to walk from New
Rochelle to church in lower New York, a distance of twenty-three
miles. As a rule they walked this distance with bare feet, carrying
their shoes in their hands.


THE GERMANS

When seeking settlers for his new colony, William Penn gained much
publicity for it in Germany, where he had a wide acquaintance. The
German Pietists responded at once, and a stream of picked families
mingled with the English Quakers who founded the City of Brotherly
Love. The first Germans to come were well-to-do people. Nearly all
had enough money left on arrival to pay for the land they took up.
In 1710, however, there arose in parts of Germany a veritable furor
to reach the New World. The people of the ravaged Palatinate became
agitated over the lure of America, and ship after ship breasted the
Delaware, black with Palatines, Hanoverians, Saxons, Austrians,
and Swiss. The cost of passage from the upper Rhine was equal to
$500 to-day; but a vast number of penniless Germans got over the
barrier by contracting with the ship-owner to sell themselves into
servitude for a term of years. These were known as "redemptioners,"
and their service was commonly for from four to six years. Before
the Revolution not fewer than 60,000 Germans had debarked at
Philadelphia, to say nothing of the thousands that settled in the
South.

Although not without a sectarian background, this great immigration
bears clearly an economic impress. The virtues of the Germans were
the economic virtues; invariably they are characterized as "quiet,
industrious, and thrifty." Although Franklin wrote, "Those who come
to us are the most stupid of their own nation," he spoke of them
later, before a committee of the House of Commons, as "a people
who brought with them the greatest of all wealth--industry and
integrity, and characters that have been superpoised and developed
by years of persecution." It is likely that the intellectual
stagnation of the Pennsylvania Germans and the smallness of their
contribution to American leadership has been due to pietistic
contempt for education rather than to the natural qualities of the
stock.


THE SCOTCH-IRISH

The flailing of the clans after the futile rising of 1745 made
the Scots restless, and in the last twelve years of the colonial
era 20,000 Highlanders sought homes in America. But most of our
Scottish blood came by way of Ireland. Early in the eighteenth
century the discriminations of Parliament against the woolen
industry of Ireland, and against Presbyterianism, provoked the
largest immigration that occurred before the Revolution. The Ulster
Presbyterians were descended from Scotsmen and English who had been
induced between 1610 and 1618 to settle in the north of Ireland,
and who were, in Macaulay's judgment, "as a class, superior to the
average of the people left behind them." They cared for ideas, and
at the beginning of the outflow there was probably less illiteracy
in Ulster than anywhere else in the world. Entire congregations
came, each headed by its pastor. "The whole North is in a ferment,"
lamented an Irish archbishop in 1728. "It looks as if Ireland
were to send all her inhabitants hither," complained the governor
of Pennsylvania. About 200,000 came over, and on the eve of the
Revolution the stock was supposed to constitute a sixth of the
population of the colonies. They settled along the frontier, and
bore the brunt of the warfare with the savage. It was owing chiefly
to them that the Quakers and Germans of Pennsylvania were left
undisturbed to live up to their ideals of peace and non-resistance.
In eminence, the lead of the Scotch-Irish has been in government,
exploration, and war, although they have not been lacking in
contributors to education and invention. In art and music they have
had little to offer.

The outstanding trait of the Scotch-Irish was _will_. No other
element was so masterful and contentious. In a petition directed
against their immigration, the Quakers characterized them as a
"pernicious and pugnacious people" who "absolutely want to control
the province themselves." The stubbornness of their character is
probably responsible for the unexampled losses in the battles of our
Civil War. They fought the Indian, fought the British with great
unanimity in two wars, and were in the front rank in the conquest of
the West. More than any other stock has this tough, gritty breed, so
lacking in poetry and sensibility, molded our national character.
If to-day a losing college crew rows so hard that they have to be
lifted from their shell at the end of the boat-race, it is because
the never-say-die Scotch-Irish fighters and pioneers have been the
picturesque and glowing figures in the imagination of American
youth.

Looked at broadly, the first peopling of this country owes at least
as much to the love of liberty as to the economic motive. In the
seventeenth century the peoples of the Old World seemed to be at
odds with one another. Race trampled on race, and the tender new
shoots of religious yearning were bruised by an iron state and an
iron church. The rumor of a virgin land where the oppressed might
dwell in peace drew together a population varied, but rich in the
spirited and in idealists. What a contrast between the English
colonies and those of the orthodox powers! For the intellectual
stagnation of the French in Canada, thank Louis XIV, who would
not allow Huguenots to settle in New France. Spain barred out the
foreigner from her colonies, and even the Spaniard might not go
thither without a permit from the Crown. Heretics were so carefully
excluded that in nearly three centuries the Inquisition in Mexico
put to death "only 41 unreconciled heretics, a number surpassed
in some single days [in Spain] in Philip II's time." No wonder
Spanish-American history shows men swayed by greed, ambition, pride,
or fanaticism, but very rarely by a moral ideal.

Let no one suppose, however, that, as were the original settlers,
so must their descendants be. When you empty a barrel of fish fry
into a new stream there is a sudden sharpening of their struggle
for existence. So, when people submit themselves to totally strange
conditions of life, Death whets his scythe, and those who survive
are a new kind of "fittest."

[Illustration: Photograph by Hine

Slovaks, Ellis Island]


THE TOLL OF THE SEA

Were the Atlantic dried up to-day, one could trace the path between
Europe and America by cinders from our steamers; in the old days
it would have revealed itself by human bones. The conditions of
over-sea passage then brought about a shocking elimination of the
weaker. The ships were small and crowded, the cabins close, and the
voyage required from six to ten weeks. "Betwixt decks," writes a
colonist, "there can hardlie a man fetch his breath by reason there
ariseth such a funke in the night that it causeth putrifacation of
the blood and breedeth disease much like the plague."

In a circular, William Penn urged those who came to keep as much
upon deck as may be, "and to carry store of _Rue_ and _Wormwood_,
or often sprinkle _Vinegar_ about the Cabbin." The ship on which he
came over lost a third of its passengers by smallpox. In 1639 the
wife of the governor of Virginia writes that the ship on which she
had come out had been "so pestered with people and goods ... so full
of infection that after a while they saw little but throwing people
overboard." One vessel lost 130 out of 150 souls. One sixth of the
three thousand Germans sent over in 1710 perished in a voyage that
lasted from January to June. No better fared a shipload of Huguenot
refugees in 1686. A ship that left Rotterdam with 150 Palatines
landed fewer than fifty after a voyage of twenty-four weeks. In
1738 "malignant fever and flux" left only 105 out of 400 Palatines.
In 1775 a brig reached New York, having lost a hundred Highlanders
in passage. It was estimated that in the years 1750 and 1755 two
thousand corpses were thrown overboard from the ships plying out of
Rotterdam. In 1756, Mittelberger thus describes the horrors of the
passage:

     During the voyage there is aboard these ships terrible misery,
     stench, fumes, vomiting, many kinds of sickness, fever,
     dysentery, scurvy, mouth-rot, and the like, all of which come
     from old and sharply salted food and meat, also from very bad
     and foul water, so that many die miserably.... Many hundred
     people necessarily perish in such misery and must be cast into
     the sea. The sighing and crying and lamenting on board the ship
     continues night and day.

Thus many poor-conditioned or ill-endowed immigrants succumbed
en route. Those of greater resolution stood the better chance;
for there was a striking difference in fate between those who lay
despairing in the cabins and those who dragged themselves every day
to the life-giving air of the deck.


THE SIFTING BY THE WILDERNESS

Even after landing, the effects of the voyage pursued the
unfortunates. In 1604, De Monts lost half his colony at St. Croix
the first winter. More than half the Pilgrims were dead before the
_Mayflower_ left for home, four months after reaching Plymouth.
Of the Puritans who came to Massachusetts Bay in 1629, a fifth
were under ground within a year. Of the 1500 who came over in the
summer of 1630, 200 died before December. In 1754, a Philadelphia
sexton testified that up to November 14 he had buried that year 260
Palatines.

In the South lay in wait the Indian and the malaria-bearing
mosquito, and the latter slew more. The whites might patch a truce
with the redskin, but never with the mosquito. They died as die
raw Europeans to-day along the lower Niger or in the delta of the
Amazon. In June, 1610, only 150 persons were living on the banks of
the James River out of 900 who had been landed there within three
years. By 1616, 1650 persons altogether had been sent out; of these
300 had returned, and about 350 were living in Virginia. During
a twelvemonth in 1619-20, 1200 left England, but only 200 were
alive in April, 1620. Fifty years later, Governor Berkeley stated:
"There is not oft seasoned hands (as we term them) that die now,
whereas heretofore not one out of five escaped the first year." A
"seasoned" servant, having only one more year to serve, brought a
better price than a new-comer, with seven and a half years to serve.
Surely the survivors of such a shock had a tough fiber to pass on
to their descendants. It is such selection that explains in part
the extraordinary blooming of the colonies after the cruel initial
period was over.


THE IMPRESS OF THE FRONTIER

No doubt the iron hardihood of the South African Boers was built up
by the succumbing of physical and moral weaklings amid a wilderness
environment. In the same way our frontier made it hard for the
soft basswood type to survive. Of the 380 persons whom Robertson
collected in North Carolina in 1779 to found what is now Nashville,
only 134 were alive at the end of a year, although not one natural
death had occurred. Six months later only seventy were left alive.
If there had been any weaklings in the party, by this time surely
the tomahawk would have found them. No wonder, then, that when the
vote was cast on the question of staying or going back, no one voted
for going back. The less hardy, too, succumbed to the fever and
ague, which decimated the settlers of the wooded country until they
had cleared the forests and drained the marshes.

In the early days there streamed over the Wilderness Road that
led to the settlements in Kentucky two tides, an outgoing tide of
stout-hearted pioneers, seeking farms in the lovely blue-grass
land, and a return flow of timid or shiftless people, affrighted
by the horrors of Indian warfare or tired of the grim struggle for
subsistence amid the stumps. The select character of those who built
up these exposed settlements explains the wonderful forcefulness of
the people of Kentucky and Ohio, especially before they had given
so many of their blood to found the commonwealths farther west.
Thanks to the protecting frontier garrisons, the settlers of the
trans-Mississippi States were perhaps not so rigorously selected
as the trans-Alleghany pioneers; but, on the other hand, they were
themselves largely of pioneer stock.

No doubt the "run of the continent" has improved the fiber of
the American people. Of course the well established and the
intellectuals had no motive to seek the West; but in energy and
venturesomeness those who sought the frontier were superior to the
average of those in their class who stayed behind. It was the pike
rather than the carp that found their way out of the pool. Now, in
the main, those who pushed through the open door of opportunity
left more children than their fellows who did not. Often themselves
members of large families, they had fecundity, as it were, in the
blood. With land abundant and the outlook encouraging, they married
earlier. In the narrow life of the young West, love and family were
stronger interests than in the older society; hence all married.
Thanks to cheap living and to the need of helpers, the big family
was welcomed. Living by agriculture, the West knew little of cities,
manufactures, social rivalry, luxury, and a serving class, all foes
of rapid multiplication.

In 1802, Michaux found the families of the Ohio settlers "always
very numerous," and of Kentucky he wrote: "There are few houses
which contain less than four or five children." Traveling in the
Ohio Valley in 1807, Cumings observed: "Throughout this whole
country, whenever you see a cabin you see a swarm of children"; and
Woods wrote in 1819: "The first thing that strikes a traveler on the
Ohio is the immense number of children." But there is solider proof
of frontier prolificacy. The census of 1830 showed the proportion
of children under five years in the States west of the Alleghanies
to be a third to a half greater than in the seaboard region. The
proportion of children to women between fifteen and fifty was from
fifty to a hundred per cent. greater. In 1840, children were forty
per cent. more numerous among the Yankees of the Western Reserve
than among their kinsmen in Connecticut. The next half-century took
the edge off the fecundity of the people of the Ohio Valley; but
their sons and daughters who had pushed on into Kansas, Nebraska,
and Minnesota, showed families a fifth larger. In 1900, the people
of the agricultural frontier--Texas, Oklahoma, and the Dakotas--had
a proportion of children larger by twenty-eight per cent. than that
of the population between Pittsburgh and Omaha.

If the frontier drew from the seaboard population a certain element,
and let it multiply more freely than it would have multiplied at
home, the frontier must have made that element more plentiful in
the American people, taken as a whole; and this, indeed, appears
to be what actually occurred. No one ventures to assert that
the Americans are differentiated from the original immigrating
stocks by superiority in any form of talent or in any kind of
sensibility; but they impress all foreign observers with their high
endowment of energy, tenacity of purpose, and willingness to take
risks, and these are just the qualities that are fostered and made
more abundant by the wilderness. I do not maintain that life in
America has added any new trait to the descendants of transplanted
Europeans, nor has it filled them all with the pioneer virtues. What
I do mean is that, owing to the progressive peopling of the fertile
wilderness, certain valuable strains that once were represented
in, say, a sixth of the population, might come to be represented
in a quarter of it; and the timid, inert sort might shrivel from a
fifth of the population to a tenth. Such a shifting in the numerical
strength of types would account both for the large contingent of the
forceful in the normal American community, and for the prevalence
of the ruthless, high-pressure, get-there-at-any-cost spirit which
leaves in its wake achievement, prosperity, neurasthenia, Bright's
disease, heart failure, and shattered moral standards.




CHAPTER II

THE CELTIC IRISH


From the outbreak of the Revolution until the fourth decade of the
nineteenth century there was a lull in immigration. In a lifetime
fewer aliens came than now debark in a couple of months. During
these sixty years powerful forces of assimilation were rapidly
molding a unified people out of the motley colonial population.
In the fermenting West, the meeting-place of men from everywhere,
elements of the greatest diversity were blending into a common
American type which soon began to tinge the streams of life that ran
distinct from one another in the seaboard States. Then came another
epoch of vast immigration, which has largely neutralized the effect
of the nationalizing forces, and has brought us into a state of
heterogeneity like to that of the later colonial era.


THE HIBERNIAN TIDE

After the great lull, the Celtic Irish were the first to come in
great numbers. From 1820 to 1850 they were more than two-fifths of
all immigrants, and during the fifties more than one-third. More
than a seventh of our 30,000,000 immigrants have brought in their
aching hearts memories of the fresh green of the moist island in
the Northern sea. The registered number is about 4,250,000, but the
actual number is larger, for many of the earlier Irish, embarking
in English ports, were counted as coming from England. No doubt
the Irish who have suffered the wrench of expatriation to America
outnumber the present population of the Green Isle, which is only
a little more than one-half of what it was before the crisis of
famine, rebellion, and misery that came about the middle of the
nineteenth century. It is, indeed, a question whether there is not
more Irish blood now on this side of the Atlantic than on the other.
It is possible that during Victoria's reign more of her subjects
left Ireland in order to live under the Stars and Stripes than left
England in order to build a Greater Britain under the Union Jack.

In his "Coronation Ode," William Watson sees Ireland as

    ... the lonely and the lovely Bride
    Whom we have wedded, but have never won.

The truth of this shows in the way the wandering Irish still
shun the lands under the British crown. Most of the inviting
frontier left on our continent lies in western Canada. Already the
opportunities there have induced land-hungry Americans to renounce
their flag at the rate of a hundred thousand in a single year. Yet
the resentful Irish turn to the narrower opportunities of what they
regard as their land of emancipation. During a recent nine-year
period, while the English and the Scotch emigrants preferred Canada
to "the States," eleven times as many Irish sought admission in
our ports as were admitted to Canada, although Canada's systematic
campaign for immigrants is carried on alike in England, Scotland,
and Ireland.

Very likely the Irish exodus is a closed chapter of history.
Ireland's population has been shrinking for sixty years, and she has
now fewer inhabitants than the State of Ohio. People are leaving
the land of heather twice as fast as they are abandoning the land
of the shamrock. The early marriage and blind prolificacy that had
overpopulated the land until half the people lived on potatoes,
and two-fifths dwelt in one-room mud cabins, are gone forever, and
Ireland has now one of the lowest birth-rates in Europe. Gradually
the people are again coming to own the ground under their feet;
native industries and native arts are reviving, and a wonderful
rural coöperative movement is in full swing. The long night of
misgovernment, ignorance, and superfecundity seems over, the star of
home rule is high, and the day may soon come when these home-loving
people will not need to seek their bread under strange skies.

During its earlier period, Irish immigration brought in a desirable
class, which assimilated readily. Later, the enormous assisted
immigration that followed the famine of 1846-48 brought in many of
an inferior type, who huddled helplessly in the poorer quarters of
our cities and became men of the spade and the hod. After the crisis
was past, there again came a type that was superior to those who
remained behind. Of course the acquiescent property-owning class
never emigrated, and those rising in trade or in the professions
rarely came unless they had fallen into trouble through their
patriotism. But of the common people there is evidence that the more
capable part leaked away to America. The Earl of Dunraven testifies:

     Those who have remained have, for the most part, been the least
     physically fit, the most mentally deficient, and those who
     correspond to the lowest industrial standard.... For half a
     century and more the best equipped, mentally and physically,
     of the population have been leaving Ireland. The survival of
     the unfittest has been the law, and the inevitable result,
     deterioration of the race, statistics abundantly prove.

Owing to this exodus of the young and energetic, Ireland has become
the country of old men and old women. An eighth of her people are
more than sixty-five years old as against an eleventh in England.
In half a century the proportion of lunatics and idiots in the
population of Ireland rose from one in 657 to one in 178. In 1906
the inspector of lunatics reported:

     The emigration of the strong and healthy members of the
     community not alone increases the ratio of the insane who are
     left behind to the general population, but also lowers the
     general standard of mental and bodily health by eliminating
     many of the members of the community who are best fitted to
     survive and propagate the race.

He may not have known that, compared with the rest of our
immigrants, the Irish have twice their share of insanity. The
commissioners of national education, after pointing with pride to
half a century's great reduction of illiteracy, add:

     The change for the better is remarkable when it is remembered
     that it was the younger and better educated who emigrated ...
     during this period, while the majority of the illiterate were
     persons who were too old to leave their homes.


THE IRISH IN THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE

A close study of two hundred workingmen's families in New York
City showed the average German family thirty dollars ahead at
the end of the year while the average Irish family of about
the same income had spent ten dollars more than it had earned.
Charity visitors know that the Irish are often as open-handed and
improvident as the Bedouins. A Catholic educator accounts for the
scarcity of Irish millionaires by declaring that his people are too
generous to accumulate great fortunes. They are free givers, and
no people are more ready to take into the family the orphans of
their relatives. In a county of mixed nationalities there will be
more mortgages and stale debts against Irish farmers than against
any others. In a well-paid class of workers there will be more
renters and fewer home-owners among the Irish than among any other
nationality of equal pay. Less habitually than others do the Irish
make systematic provision for old age. They depend on the earnings
of their children, who, indeed, are many and loyal enough. But
if the children die early or scatter, the day-laborer must often
eat the bread of charity. A decade ago the Irish were found to be
relatively thrice as numerous in our almshouses as other non-native
elements. In the Northeast, where they formed a quarter of the
foreign-born population, they furnished three-fifths of the paupers.
In Massachusetts, and in Boston as well, they were four times as
common in the almshouses as out of them, although, to be sure, a
part of this bad showing is due to more of them being aged. Nor
do their children provide much better for the future. In Boston,
those of Irish parentage produce two and one-half times their quota
of paupers. In both first and second generations the frugal and
fore-looking Germans there have less than a tenth of the pauperism
of the Irish, while in 1910 in the country at large the tendency of
the Irish toward the almshouse was nearly three times that of the
Germans. Dr. Bushee, who has investigated the conditions in Boston,
says:

     It cannot be said that the ordinary Irishman is of a provident
     disposition; he lives in the present and worries comparatively
     little about the future. He is not extravagant in any particular
     way, but is wasteful in every way; it is his nature to drift
     when he ought to plan and economize. This disposition, combined
     with an ever-present tendency to drink too much, is liable to
     result in insecure employment and a small income. And, to make
     matters worse, in families of this kind children are born with
     reckless regularity.

In extenuation, let it not be forgotten that at home the earlier
Irish immigrants had lived under perhaps a more demoralizing social
condition than that from which any other of our immigrants have
come. Fleeing from plague and starvation, great numbers were dumped
at our ports with no means of getting out upon the land. What was
there for them to do but to rush their labor into the nearest market
and huddle sociably together in wretched slums, where, despite their
sturdy physique, they fell an easy prey to sickness and died off
twice as fast as they should? They lived as poorly as do the Russian
Jews when first they come; but, being a green country-folk, they
understood less than do the town-bred Jews how to withstand the
noxious influences of cities and slums.

Certainly, along with their courage and loyalty, the Irish did not
bring the economic virtues. Straight from the hoe they came, without
even the thrift of the farmer who owns the land he tills. Many of
them were no better fitted to succeed in the modern competitive
order than their ancestors of the septs in the days of Strongbow. In
value-sense and foresight, how far they stand behind Scot, Fleming,
or Yankee! In the acquisitive mêlée most of them are as children
compared with the Greek or the Semite. An observant settlement
worker has said:

     The Irish are apt to make their occupation a secondary matter.
     They remain idle if no man hires them; but not so the Jew. If he
     can get no regular employment, it is possible to gather rags and
     junk and sell them.... If employed under a hard master, he still
     works on under conditions that would drive the Irishman to drink
     and the American to suicide until finally he sees an opportunity
     to improve his condition.

We must not forget that Irish development had been forcibly arrested
by the selfish policy of their conquerors. In the latter part of
the seventeenth century the English Parliament, at the behest of
English graziers and farmers, put an end to Ireland's cattle-trade
to England, then to her exportation of provisions to the colonies.
Afterward came export duties on Irish woolens, and, later, complete
prohibition of the exportation of woolens to foreign countries.
"Cotton, glass, hats, iron manufactures, sugar refining--whatever
business Ireland turned her hand to, and always with success--was
in turn restricted." The result was that the natural capacity of
the people was repressed, the growth of industrial habits was
checked, and the country was held down to simple agriculture under
a blighting system of absentee landlordism. Still, we cannot
overlook the success of the Scottish Lowlanders in Ulster under the
same strangling discriminations, nor forget that the 3500 German
Protestant refugees who were settled in Munster in 1709 prospered
as did their brother refugees in Pennsylvania, and became in time
much wealthier than their Celtic neighbors.

A thousand years ago an Irish scholar, teaching at Liège,
acknowledged his love for the cup in his invocation to the Muses,
and addressed a poem to a friend who, being the possessor of a great
vineyard, understood "how to awaken genius through the inspiration
of the heavenly dew."


ALCOHOLISM THE FREQUENT CAUSE OF POVERTY

It is this same "heavenly dew"--whose Erse name _usquebaugh_, we
have pronounced "whisky"--that, more than anything else, has held
back the Irish in America. The Irishman is no more a craver of
alcohol than other men, but his sociability betrays him to that
beverage which is the seal of good fellowship. He does not sit
down alone with a bottle, as the Scandinavian will do, nor get his
friends round a table and quaff _lager_, as the German does. No
"Dutch treat" for him. He drinks spirits in public, and, after a
dram or two, his convivial nature requires that every stranger in
the room shall seal friendship in a glass with him. His temperament,
too, makes liquor a snare to him. Where another drinker becomes
mellow or silent or sodden, the Celt becomes quarrelsome and foolish.

Twenty years ago an analysis of more than seven thousand cases of
destitution in our cities showed that drink was twice as frequent
a cause of poverty among the Irish cases as among the Germans,
and occurred half again as often among them as among the native
American cases. Among many thousands of recent applications for
charity, "intemperance of the bread-winner" crops out as a cause of
destitution in one case out of twelve among old-strain Americans;
but it taints one case out of seven among the Irish and one case
out of six among the Irish of the second generation. In the charity
hospitals of New York alcoholism is responsible for more than a
fifth of all the cases. Drink is the root of the trouble in a
quarter of the native Americans treated, in a third of the Irish
patients, and in two-fifths of the cases among the native-born of
Irish fathers. Contrast this painful showing with the fact that one
Italian patient out of sixty, one Magyar patient out of seventy,
one Polish patient out of eighty, and one Hebrew patient out of one
hundred is in the hospital on account of drink!


IRISH NEAR THE FOOT OF THE LIST IN CRIME

In the quality of their crimes our immigrants differ more from one
another than they do in complexion or in the color of their eyes.
The Irishman's love of fighting has made Donnybrook Fair a byword;
yet it is a fact that personal violence is six or seven times as
often the cause of confinement for Italian, Magyar, or Finnish
prisoners in our penitentiaries as for the Irish. Patrick may be
quarrelsome, but he fights with his hands, and in his cups he is
not homicidal, like the South Italian, or ferocious, like the
Finn. Three-fifths of the Hebrew convicts are confined for gainful
offenses, but only one-fifth of the Irish. Among a score or more of
nationalities, the Irish stand nearly at the foot of the list in the
commission of larceny, burglary, forgery, fraud, or homicide. Rape,
pandering, and the white-slave traffic are almost unknown among
them. What could be more striking than the fact that more than half
of the Irish convicts have been sent up for "offenses against public
order," such as intoxication and vagrancy! One cannot help feeling
that the Celtic offender is a feckless fellow, enemy of himself more
than of any one else. It is usually not cupidity nor brutality nor
lust that lodges him in prison, but conviviality and weak control of
impulses.

It is certain that no immigrant is more loyal to wife and child than
the Irishman. Out of nearly ten thousand charity cases in which a
wife was the head of the family, the greatest frequency of widowhood
and the least frequency of desertion or separation is among the
Irish. In only eighteen per cent. of the Irish cases is the husband
missing; whereas among the Hebrews, Slovaks, Lithuanians, and
Magyars he is missing in from forty to fifty per cent. of the cases.
But the sons of Irish, with that ready adaptation to surroundings
characteristic of the Celt, desert their wives with just about the
same frequency as men of pure American stock; namely, thirty-six per
cent., or twice that of their fathers.


GREAT CHANGES IN OCCUPATION AMONG THE IRISH

Thirty years ago, when the Irish and the Germans in America were
nearly equal in number, there were striking contrasts in the place
they took in industry. As domestic servants, laborers, mill-hands,
miners, quarrymen, stone-cutters, laundry workers, restaurant
keepers, railway and street-car employees, officials and employees
of government, the Irish were two or three times as numerous as the
Germans. On the other hand, as farmers, saloon-keepers, bookkeepers,
designers, musicians, inventors, merchants, manufacturers,
and physicians, the Germans far outnumbered the Irish. Where
artistic skill is required, as in confectionery, cabinet-making,
wood-carving, engraving, photography, and jewelry-making; where
scientific knowledge is called for, as in brewing, distilling,
sugar-refining, and iron manufacture, the Irish were hopelessly
beaten by the trained and plodding Germans.

For a while, the bulk of Irish formed a pick-and-shovel caste,
claiming exclusive possession of the poorest and least honorable
occupations, and mobbing the Chinaman or the <DW64> who intruded into
their field. But the record of their children proves that there is
nothing in the stock that dooms it forever to serve at the tail-end
of a wheelbarrow. Take, for instance, those workers known to the
statistician as "Female bread-winners." Of the first generation
of Irish, fifty-four per cent. are servants and waitresses; of
the second generation, only sixteen per cent. Whither have these
daughters gone? Out of the kitchen into the factory, the store,
the office, and the school. In the needle trades they are twice as
frequent as Bridget or Nora who came over in the steerage. Five
times as often they serve behind the counter, seven times as often
they work at the desk as stenographer or bookkeeper, five times
as frequently they teach. One native girl out of twelve whose
fathers were Irish is a teacher, as against one girl out of nine
with American fathers. The Irish girls of the second generation
are twice as well represented as the native-born German girls.
Evidently it will not be long before they have their full share of
school positions. In thirty leading cities eighteen per cent. of the
teachers are second-generation Irish; and there are cities where
these swift climbers constitute from two-fifths to a half of the
teaching force.

'Tonio or Ivan now wields the shovel while Michael's boy escapes
competition with him by running nimbly up the ladder of occupations.
As compared with their immigrant fathers, the proportion of
laborers among the sons of Irishmen is halved, while that of
professional men and salesmen is doubled, and that of clerks,
copyists, and bookkeepers is trebled. The quota of saloon-keepers
remains the same. There is no drift into agriculture or into
mercantile pursuits. In the cities the Irish suffer little from
the competition of the later immigrants because, thanks to
their political control, they divide among themselves much
of the work carried on by the municipality as well as the jobs
under the great franchise-holding corporations. So far, the
strength of the Irish has been in personal relations. They shine
in the forum, in executive work, in public guardianship, and in
public transportation, but not in the more monotonous branches of
manufacture. In the colleges it has been noted that the students of
Irish blood are strong for theology and law, but show little taste
for medicine, engineering, or technology.

[Illustration: Distribution of Irish and natives of Irish
Parentage--1910]

Among the first thousand men of science in America the Irish are
only a fourth as well represented as the Germans, a fifteenth as
well as the English and Canadians, and a twentieth as well as the
Scotch. This backwardness is in part due to the overhang of bad
conditions; and the compilers of the table very properly suggest
that "the native-born sons of Irish-born parents may not be inferior
in scientific productivity to other classes of the community." The
same comment may be made on the fact that of the persons listed in
"Who's Who in America," two per cent. were German-born, another two
per cent. were English-born, but only one per cent. came from the
land of Erin.


IRISH INTELLECT AND MENTAL ABILITY

No doubt the peaks of Celtic superiority are poetry and eloquence.
Their gifts of emotion and imagination give the Irish the key to
human hearts. They are eloquent for the same reason that they are
poor technicians and investigators, for the typical Celt sees things
not as they really are, _but as they are to him_.

The Irishman still leans on authority and shows little tendency to
think for himself. In philosophy and science he is far behind the
head of the procession. Even when well-educated, he thinks within
the framework formed by certain conventional ideas. Unlike the
educated German or Jew, he rarely ventures to dissect the ideas
of parental authority, the position of woman, property, success,
competition, individual liberty, etc., that lie at the base of
commonplace thought. Here, again, this limitation by sentiment and
authority derives doubtless from the social history of the Irish
rather than from their blood. They have been engrossed with an
old-fashioned problem--that of freeing their country. Meanwhile, the
luckier peoples have swept on to ripen their thinking about class
relations, industrial organization, and social institutions.


TRAITS OF THE CELT

With his Celtic imagination as a magic glass, the Irishman sees
into the human heart and learns how to touch its strings. No one
can wheedle like an Irish beggar or "blarney" like an Irish ward
boss. Not only do the Irish furnish stirring orators, persuasive
stump-speakers, moving pleaders, and delightful after-dinner
speech-makers, but they give us good salesmen and successful
traveling-men. Then, too, they know how to manage people. The Irish
contractor is a great figure in construction work. The Irish mine
"boss" or section foreman has the knack of handling men. The Irish
politician is an adept in "lining up" voters of other nationalities.
More Germans than Irish enlisted in the Union armies, but more of
the Irish rose to be officers. In the great corporations Americans
control policy and finance, Germans are used in technical work,
and Irishmen are found in executive positions. The Irish are well
to the fore in organizing labor and in leading athletics. "Of
two applicants," says a city school superintendent, "I take the
teacher with an Irish name, because she will have less trouble
in discipline, and hits it off better with the parents and the
neighborhood."

Whatever is in the Irish mind is available on the instant, so that
the Irish rarely fail to do themselves justice. They keep their
best foot forward, and if they fall, they light on their feet. They
succeed as lawyers not only because they can play upon the jury,
but because they are quick in thrust and parry. They abound in
newspaper offices because their imagination enables them to keep
"in touch" with the public mind. The Irishman rarely attains the
thorough knowledge of the German physician; but he makes his mark
as surgeon, because he is quick to perceive and to decide when the
knife discloses a grave, unsuspected condition.

The Irishman accepts the Erse proverb, "Contention is better than
loneliness." "His nature goes out to the other fellow all the time,"
declares a wise priest. The lodge meeting of a Hibernian benevolent
association is a revelation of kindness and delicacy of feeling in
rough, toil-worn men. A great criminal lawyer tells me that if he
has a desperate case to defend, he keeps the cold-blooded Swede
off the jury and gets an Irishman on, especially one who has been
"in trouble." Bridget becomes attached to the family she serves,
and, after she is married, calls again and again "to see how the
childher are coming on." Freda, after years of service, will leave
you off-hand and never evince the remotest interest in your family.
The Irish detest the merit system, for they make politics a matter
of friendship and favor. In their willingness to serve a friend they
are apt to lose sight of the importance of preparation, fitness
and efficiency in the public servant. Hence they warm to a reform
movement only when it becomes a fight on law-breakers. Then the
Hibernian district attorney goes after the "higher-ups" like a St.
George. When the Irish do renounce machine politics, they become
broad democrats rather than "good government" men.

Imaginative and sensitive to what others think of him, the Celt is
greatly affected by praise and criticism. Unlike the Teuton, he
cannot plod patiently toward a distant goal without an appreciative
word or glance. He does his best when he is paced, for emulation
is his sharpest stimulus. The grand stand has something to do with
the Irish bent for athletic contests. Irish school-children love
the lime-light, and distinguish themselves better on the platform
than in the classroom. Irish teachers with good records in the
training-school are less likely than other teachers to improve
themselves by private study.

"The Irish are wilder than the rest in their expression of grief,"
observes the visiting nurse, "but they don't take on for long." The
Irishman is less persistent than others in keeping up the premiums
on his insurance policy, the payments on his building-and-loan
association stock. He is quick to throw up his job or change his
place in order to avoid sameness. "My will is strong," I heard a
bright-eyed Kathleen say, "but it keeps changing its object; Gunda
[her Norwegian friend] is _so_ determined and fixed in purpose!"
There is a proverb, "The Irishman is no good till he is kicked,"
meaning that he is unstable till his blood is up. Once his fighting
spirit is roused, he proves to be a "last ditcher." As a soldier, he
is better in a charge than in defense, and if held back, he frets
himself to exhaustion.

A professor compares his Celtic students to the game trout, which
makes one splendid dash for the fly, but sulks if he misses it. A
bishop told me how his prize-man, an Irish youth, sent to Paris
to study Hebrew, was amazed at the prodigious industry of his
German and Polish chums. "I never knew before," he wrote, "what
study is." A settlement worker comments on the avidity with which
night-school pupils in Irish neighborhoods select classes with
interesting subjects of instruction, and the rapidity with which
they drop off when the "dead grind" begins. Their temperament rebels
at close, continuous application. The craftsman of Irish blood is
likely to be a little slapdash in method, and he rarely stands
near the top of his trade in skill. The Irishman succeeds best
in staple farming--all wheat, all cotton, or all beets. With the
advent of diversified farming, he is supplanted by the painstaking
German, Scandinavian, or Pole. Work requiring close attention
to details--like that of the nurseryman, the florist, or the
breeder--falls into the hands of a more patient type. In banking and
finance, men of a colder blood control.


FUTURE OF THE IRISH-AMERICAN

The word "brilliant" is oftener used for the Irish than for any
other aliens among us save the Hebrews. Yet those of Irish blood
are far from manning their share of the responsible non-political
posts in American society. Their contribution by no means matches
that of an equal number of the old American breed. But, in sooth,
it is too soon yet to expect the Irish strain to show what it can
do. Despite their schooling, the children of the immigrant from
Ireland often become infected with the parental slackness, unthrift,
and irresponsibility. They in turn communicate some of the heritage
to their children; so that we shall have to wait until the fourth
generation before we shall learn how the Hibernian stock compares in
value with stocks that have had a happier social history.

[Illustration:

  1821-25        12900

  1826-30        37800

  1831-35        70300

  1836-40       135100

  1841-45       187100

  1846-50       593600  {FAMINE AND
                        {
  1851-55       694700  {REBELLION IN IRELAND

  1856-60       219400   HARD TIMES IN UNITED STATES

  1861-65       196400   CIVIL WAR IN UNITED STATES

  1866-70       239400

  1871-75       295200

  1876-80       141700   HARD TIMES IN UNITED STATES

  1881-85       345400   FAMINE IN IRELAND

  1886-90       310100

  1891-95       227200

  1896-1900     161200   HARD TIMES IN UNITED STATES

  1901-05       184100

  1906-10       155000

Immigration from Ireland 1821-1910]




CHAPTER III

THE GERMANS


More than 5,250,000 people have been contributed to our population
by Germany in the last ninety years. Deducting the Poles from
eastern Prussia, and counting Germans from Russia, Austria, Bohemia,
and eastern Switzerland, we have, no doubt, received more than
7,000,000 whose mother-tongue was the speech of Luther and Goethe.
It is probable that German blood has come to be at least a fourth
part of the current in the veins of the white people of this
country, so that this infusion alone equals the total volume of
Spanish and Portuguese blood in South America.

From its rise in the thirties until after our Civil War, the stream
of immigrants from Germany fluctuated with religious and political
conditions on the other side of the Atlantic rather than with
economic conditions on this side. Between 1839 and 1845 numerous
Old Lutherans, resenting the attempt of their king to unite the
Lutheran and the Reformed faiths, migrated hither from Pomerania and
Brandenburg. The political reaction in the German states after the
revolution of 1830, and again after the revolution of 1848, brought
tens of thousands of liberty-lovers. In 1851, in a book of advice
to intending immigrants, Pastor Bogen of Boston set forth as the
chief inducement to migrate the _freedom_ the Germans would enjoy
in America--freedom from oppression and despotism, from privileged
orders and monopolies, from intolerable imposts and taxes, from
constraint in matters of conscience, from restrictions on settling
anywhere in this country of "exhaustless resources."

The political exiles famous as the "Forty-eighters" included many
men of unusual attainments and character, who almost at once became
leaders of the German-Americans, exercising an influence quite
out of proportion to their numbers. These university professors,
physicians, journalists, and even aristocrats, aroused many of their
fellow-countrymen to feel a pride in German culture, and they left
a stamp of political idealism, social radicalism, and religious
skepticism which is slow to be effaced.

Thanks to the _Hausfrau_ ideal for women and to the militarist
demand for recruits, the German people has until recently
persevered in a truly medieval fecundity. Despite an outflow of
6,500,000 between 1820 and 1893, population has doubled in seventy
years and trebled in a hundred. Prince Bülow complains that "the
Poles of eastern Prussia multiply like rabbits, while we Germans
multiply like hares." The fact is, a generation ago the Germans,
too, were multiplying like rabbits. This is the reason why during
the seventies and eighties, although political conditions had
much improved, great numbers of farm-laborers, female servants,
handicraftsmen, small tradesmen, and other members of the humbler
classes, streamed out of crowded Germany in the hope of improving
their material condition. The peasant living on black bread and
potatoes heard of and longed for the white bread and fleshpots
of the American West. Although the overwhelming majority of the
1,500,000 Germans who immigrated during the eighties represented
the lower economic strata, they came in with fair schooling,
considerable industrial skill, and, on an average, three times as
much money as the Slav, Hebrew, or South European shows to-day at
Ellis Island.

The German influx dropped sharply as soon as the panic of 1893
broke out, and when, after four and a half years of economic
submergence, this country struggled to the surface, the tide of
Teutons was not ready to flow again. America's free land was gone,
and ruder peoples, with lower standards of living, were crowding
into her labor markets. In the meantime, Germany's extraordinary
rise as a manufacturing country, her successes in foreign trade,
and her wonderful system of protection and insurance for her labor
population, had made her sons and daughters loath to migrate
oversea. The immigration from Germany into the United States is
virtually a closed chapter, and has been so for twenty years. Such
Germans as now arrive hail chiefly from Austria and Russia.


DISTRIBUTION THROUGHOUT THE STATES

No other foreign element is so generally distributed over the United
States as the Germans. A third of them are between Boston and
Pittsburgh, fifty-five per cent. live between Pittsburgh and Denver,
seven per cent. are in the South, and five per cent. are in the far
West.

In the South they are more numerous than any other non-native
element. They predominate, except in New England, where the Irish
abound; in States along the northern border, into which filter
many Canadians; in the Dakotas, where the Scandinavians lead; in
the Mormon States, with their many converts from England; and in
Louisiana and Florida, with their Italians and Cubans. In Milwaukee
nearly half the people are of German parentage, in Cincinnati a
quarter, in St. Louis a fifth. A third of the Germans are in the
rural districts, whereas all but a sixth of the Irish are in cities.
Whether one considers their distribution among the States, their
partition between city and country, or their dispersion among the
callings, the Germans will be found to be the most pervasive element
so far added to our people.


ASSIMILATION WITH NEW NEIGHBORS

Unlike the Irish immigrants, the Germans brought a language,
literature, and social customs of their own; so that, although when
scattered they Americanized with great rapidity, wherever they were
strong enough to maintain churches and schools in their own tongue
they were slow to take the American stamp. For the sake of their
beloved _Deutschtum_, about the middle of the last century the
promoters of this migration dreamed of creating in the West a German
state where Germans should hold sway and hand down their culture
in all its purity. Missouri, Illinois, Texas, and later Wisconsin,
seemed to hold out such a hope. But the immigrants would not remain
massed, the Yankees pushed in, and "Little Germany" never found a
place on the map.

After 1870 the Teutonic overflow was prompted by economic motives,
and such a migration shows little persistence in flying the flag
of its national culture. Numbers came, little instructed, or else
bringing a knowledge of Old Testament worthies rather than of German
poets, musicians, and artists. In the words of a German-American,
Knortz: "Nine-tenths of all German immigrants come from humble
circumstances and have had only an indifferent schooling. Whoever,
therefore, expects pride in their German descent from these people,
who owe everything to their new country and nothing to their
fatherland, simply expects too much."

The "Forty-eighters" had given a great stimulus to all German forms
of life,--schools, press, stage, festivals, choral societies, and
gymnastic societies,--but since the passing of these leaders and the
subsidence of the Teutonic freshet, _Deutschtum_ has been on the
wane. German newspapers are disappearing, German-American books
and journals become fewer, German book stores are failing, German
theaters are closing, and the surviving German private schools may
be counted on the fingers. Probably not more than ten per cent. of
the children of German parentage hear anything but English spoken
at home. Champions of _Deutschtum_ admit sadly that nothing but a
strong current of immigration can preserve it here. The spreading
German-American National Alliance is bringing about a marked
revival, but hardly will it succeed in persuading the majority of
its people to lay upon their children the burden of a bi-lingual
education. It is the apparent destiny of the descendants of the
myriads of Germans who have settled here to lose themselves in the
American people, and to take the stamp of a culture which is, in
origin at least, eighty per cent. British.

It is no small tribute to the solvent power of American civilization
that the stable and conservative Germans, who, as settlers in
Transylvania, in Chili, or in Palestine, among the Russians on the
lower Volga, or among the Portuguese in southern Brazil, are careful
to keep themselves unspotted from the people about them, have
proved, on the whole, easy to Americanize. Years ago, Prof. James
Bryce, just back from Ararat, after noting the purity of the German
culture preserved by the Swabian colony in Tiflis, added:

     It was very curious to contrast this complete persistence of
     Teutonism here with the extremely rapid absorption of the
     Germans among other citizens which one sees going on in those
     towns of the Western States of America, where--as in Milwaukee,
     for instance--the inhabitants are mostly Germans, and still
     speak English with a markedly foreign accent.... Here they are
     exiles from a higher civilization planted in the midst of a
     lower one; there they lose themselves among a kindred people,
     with whose ideas and political institutions they quickly come to
     sympathize.


INFLUENCE OF THE GERMANS IN AMERICA

The leanness of his home acres taught the German to make the most
of his farm in the New World. The immigrant looked for good land
rather than for land easy to subdue. Knowing that a heavy forest
growth proclaims rich soil, he shunned the open areas, and chopped
his homestead out of the densest woods. While the American farmer,
in his haste to live well, mined the fertility out of the soil,
the German conserved it by rotating crops and feeding live stock.
In caring for his domestic animals, he set an example. Just as
the county agricultural fair, and the state fair as well, is the
development of the Pennsylvania-German _Jahrmarkt_, and the "prairie
schooner" is the lineal descendant of the "Conestoga wagon," so the
capacious red barns of the Middle West trace their ancestry back to
the big barn which the Pennsylvania "Dutchman" provided at a time
when most farmers let their stock run unsheltered.

Thanks partly to good farming and frugal living, and partly to the
un-American practice of working their women in the fields, the
German farmers made money, bought choice acres from under their
neighbors' feet, and so kept other nationalities on the move. This
is the reason why a German settlement spreads on fat soil and why
in time the best land in the region is likely to come into German
hands. Unlike the restless American, with his ears ever pricked to
the hail of distant opportunity, the phlegmatic German identifies
himself with his farm, and feels a pride in keeping it in the family
generation after generation. Taking fewer chances in the lottery
of life than his enterprising Scotch-Irish or limber-minded Yankee
neighbor, he has drawn from it fewer big prizes, but also fewer
blanks.

In quest of vinous exhilaration, our grandfathers stood at a bar
pouring down ardent spirits. It is owing to our German element that
the mild _lager_ beer has largely displaced whisky as the popular
beverage, while sedentary drinking steadily gains on perpendicular
drinking. Because the toping of beer has from time immemorial been
interwoven with their social enjoyments, and because beer, unlike
whisky, makes wassailers fraternal rather than wild and quarrelsome,
the Germans, supported by the Bohemians, have offered, in the name
of "personal liberty," the most determined opposition to liquor
legislation. They may renounce the bowl, but taken away it shall
not be! In their loyalty to beer, these Teutons out-German their
cousins in the Fatherland, who are of late turning from the national
beverage at an astonishing rate. At the World's Fair in St. Louis
a number of American scholars who had studied of yore in German
universities gave a luncheon to the visiting German economists.
Out of respect for their guests, the hosts all filled the mugs of
their student days; but, to their astonishment, the Germans called
unanimously for iced tea!

The influence of the Germans in spreading among us the love of good
music and good drama is acknowledged by all. But there is a more
subtle transformation that they have wrought on American taste.
The social diversions of the Teutons, and their affirmance of the
"joy of living," have helped to clear from our eyes the Puritan
jaundice that made all physical and social enjoyment look sinful. If
"innocent recreation" and "harmless amusement" are now phrases to
conjure with, it is largely owing to the Germans and Bohemians, with
their love of song and mirth and "having a good time." Few of the
present generation realize that fifty years ago the principal place
of amusement in the American town, although as innocent of opera as
a Kaffir _kraal_, called itself the "opera-house," in order to avoid
the damning stigma the reigning Puritanism had attached to the word
"theater."

As voters, the Germans have shown little clannishness. Their
partizanship has not been bigoted, and by their insistence
on independent voting they have perplexed and disgusted the
politicians. Before 1850, they saw in the Democratic party the
champion of the liberties for the sake of which they had
expatriated themselves. But when the slavery issue came to be
overshadowing, the "Forty-eighters" were able to swing them to the
newly formed Republican party, to which, on the whole, they have
remained faithful, although in some States their loyalty has been
much shaken by prohibition. On money questions the Germans have been
conservative. Bringing with them the notion of an efficient civil
service, they have despised office-mongering and have befriended the
merit system. No immigrants have been more apt to look at public
questions from a common-welfare point of view and to vote for their
principles rather than for their friends. If by "political aptitude"
is meant the skill to use politics for private advantage, then in
this capacity the German must be ranked low among our foreign-born.

[Illustration: Distribution of Germans and natives of German
Parentage--1910]

In the way of civil and political liberty, the Germans added nothing
to the old-English heritage they found here; but in freedom of
thought their contribution has been invaluable. Where there is no
church, state, or upper class to hold it in check, the community is
likely to show itself imperious toward the nonconformist. The New
England Puritan, who was oak to any civil authority that he had not
helped to constitute, was a reed before the pressure of community
opinion. The sturdy Germans flouted this tyranny _sans_ tyrant. At
a time when the would-be-respectable American stifled under a pall
of conventionality in regard to religion and manners, they asserted
the right to think and speak for themselves without incurring loss
or ostracism. Then, too, the scholarly German immigrant imparted to
us his sense of the dignity of science and its right to be free,
although, to be sure, this spirit has been fostered among us chiefly
by Americans who have studied in German universities. On the whole,
in the way of intellectual liberty, the university-bred Liberals of
1848 had as much to offer as they gained in the way of political
liberty.


THE GERMANS IN THE CIVIL WAR

At the outbreak of the Civil War the Germans, with their deep
detestation of slavery, played no small rôle. In the South, those
of later immigration opposed the Confederacy; in the North their
leaders lined them up solidly in support of the Union. About 200,000
Germans enlisted in the Union army, more than there were of Irish
volunteers, although the Irish were more numerous in the population
of the loyal States. The militia companies formed among the Germans
in Missouri, especially in St. Louis, were pivotal in saving that
State for the Union. The military knowledge of Prussians who had
seen service in the old country was valued, sometimes over-valued,
in the earlier stage of the conflict. The all-German divisions
of Steinwehr and Schurz, after being roundly, perhaps unjustly,
abused for not holding Jackson at Chancellorsville, fought well at
Gettysburg and distinguished themselves in the "battle among the
clouds."


THE GERMANS IN THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE

Probably no compliment has ever been bestowed on the Germans in
America that did not contain the words "industrious and thrifty."
Nor is it surprising that the members of a race so forelooking
and reflective rarely sink into the mire of poverty. In 1900, the
Germans were 25.8 per cent. of our foreign-born, and three years
later it was found that only 23.3 per cent. of the foreign-born in
our almshouses were Germans. For the country at large, we have no
means of comparing the German with the American in his ability to
take care of himself; but studies made in Boston showed that the
proportion of Boston Germans in the city almshouse was half that of
the English in that city, one-sixth of that of the Scotch, and only
one-tenth of that of the Irish. In the state charitable institutions
of Massachusetts, Germans make a better showing than Celts, but not
so good a showing as Scandinavians and Americans.

To the various relief agencies in Boston, Germans apply less often
than any other of the English-speaking immigrants. The analyst of
Boston's foreign-born is struck by the small number of Germans and
Scandinavians who seek aid, and says:

     Occasionally, it is true, idle and shiftless families are found
     among both these peoples; but on the whole they are industrious
     and thrifty, and less hopeless poverty is found among them
     than among almost any of the other foreign immigrants.... The
     Germans are without doubt the best type of immigrants which has
     settled in Boston.

In our cities, no other element has so large a proportion of
home-owners, and in the care of the home they surpass all other
nationalities save the Swedes.


ALCOHOLISM AMONG THE GERMANS

The saturation of the social life of our Germans with the amber
beverage, as well as their hostility to prohibition, prepares us to
find alcoholism very common among the disciples of St. Gambrinus.
The fact is, however, that in point of sobriety hardly any North
European makes so good a record as the German. A few years ago an
analysis of 2075 charity cases showed that drink as the cause of
poverty occurred only one-half as often among the German cases as
among the Irish, and two-thirds as often as among native American
cases. In the charity hospitals of New York, the proportion of
German patients treated for alcoholism is only half as large as that
of the English and the native Americans, and only a third as great
as that of the Irish. The charity workers in our cities report that
"intemperance of the bread-winner" is less often found to be the
cause of destitution among the German applicants than among those of
any other North-European nationality. Among alien prisoners only one
German of twenty-two was committed for intoxication as against one
out of three Irish, one out of four French Canadians, one out of
five Scotch, and one out of eight Scandinavians. On the other hand,
the victims of drink are far more numerous among them than among the
Italians, Magyars, Jews, and Syrians. These peoples, vine-growers
and wine-bibbers from time immemorial, have had the chance to get
drunk many thousand years longer than the Celts and Teutons; hence
they have been more completely purged of their alcoholics. While a
light beverage like beer produces fewer sots and wrecks than the
"water of life" so grateful to the Northern palate, it produces
a vast unreported stupefying and deterioration; so there is good
reason why the German drinking customs are being sloughed off in
the Fatherland at the very moment they are being warmly defended in
America.


AMOUNT OF CRIME NORMAL AMONG GERMANS

The striking thing about the abnormality of the Germans is its
normality in amount. Among the foreign-born, the Germans have just
about their due share of insanity, neither less nor more. Likewise,
the marked feature of German crime in this country is simply its
featurelessness. Among the twelve thousand-odd aliens in our
prisons, the German prisoners run a little above the average in
their bent for gainful offenses and a little below the average in
their crimes of violence. In their leaning to other offenses they
come close to the mean. Among the twenty nationalities that figure
in the police arrests of Chicago, the German stands, with respect
to almost every form of misconduct, near the middle of the list.
The French and the Hebrews stand out in bad eminence as offenders
against chastity, the Italians lead in murder and blackmail, the
Americans in burglary, the Greeks in kidnapping, the Lithuanians
in assault, the Irish in disorderly conduct. But the German lacks
distinction in evil, never coming near either the top or the bottom
of the scale in predilection for any form of crime. On the whole,
his criminal bent is very close to that of the native American.


WIDE VARIETY OF OCCUPATION

The Germans brought us much more in the way of industrial skill and
professional training than the Irish; besides, they were much more
successful in planting themselves upon the soil. They tended far
more to farming and manufacturing, far less to domestic and personal
service and transportation. The second generation shows no marked
drift away from the farm. In 1900, three-fifths of all brewers in
the country were Germans, a third of the bakers and cabinet-makers,
a fifth of the saloon-keepers and butchers, a sixth of the hatters,
tailors, and coopers, and a seventh of the musicians and teachers of
music. Yet only one male bread-winner out of nineteen was a German.

The sons of Germans are a sixteenth of our male labor force; but
they furnish a quarter of the trunk-and-satchel makers, a fifth
of the bottlers, stovemakers, and engravers, and a sixth of the
upholsterers, bookbinders, paper-box makers, butchers, brewers, and
brass-workers. In our cities the German baker, tailor, butcher,
cabinet-maker, or engraver is quite as characteristic and familiar
a figure as the Irish drayman, fireman, brakeman, section boss,
street-car conductor, plumber, or policeman.

The immigrant German women begin rather higher in the scale of
occupation than the Irish, but their daughters do not rise in
life with such amazing buoyancy as do the daughters of the Irish.
Between the first-generation and the second-generation Germans the
proportion of servants and waitresses falls from a third of all
female bread-winners to a quarter. For the Irish the drop is from
fifty-four per cent. to sixteen per cent. The second-generation
Germans do not show such an advance on their parents as do the
second-generation Irish, who bob up like corks released at the
bottom of a stream.


TEUTONIC TRAITS

Physically the German is strong, but often too stocky for grace.
A blend with the taller and thinner American is likely to give
good results in figure. Being slow in response, he makes a poor
showing in competitive sports. His forte is gymnastics rather
than athletics, and he is to be found in the indoor, sedentary
trades rather than in the active, outdoor callings. Not often
will you come upon him riveting trusses far up on the skyscraper
or the railway bridge. His pleasures he takes sitting rather than
moving, so that he haunts summer-garden and picnic-ground rather
than base-ball diamond and bowling-alley. For all his traditional
domesticity, he is a sociable soul, and will lug off his entire
family to a public resort, when an American would prefer a pipe by
the fireside. He is fond of the table, and loves to enjoy talk,
music, or drama while eating and drinking. In comparison with the
native Americans, or the Celts from the British Isles, the Germans
in America have the name of being materialistic. If this be true,
it is doubtless due to the small representation among them of that
noble leavening type that has made the spiritual greatness of
Germany. Any one who has lived in the old country knows that there
is a kind of German that one rarely sees among our fellow-citizens.
Of such were the "Forty-eighters"; but as their influence fades, the
idealism they fanned dies down, and visitors from the Fatherland
complain that America has stamped its dollar-mark all over the souls
of their kinsmen here. Professor Hugo Münsterberg, an impartial
observer, judges that "the average German-American stands below the
level of the average German at home."

But if he chases the dollar, let us grant that he does it in his
own way. Honest and stable, he puts little faith in short-cuts to
riches, such as "scream" advertising, commercial humbug, "faked"
news, thimblerig finance, or political graft. He does not count
on skipping many rungs in the ladder of success. German business
enterprises grow slowly, but if you probe them, you find a solid
texture. The German is hard-headed, and is not easily borne off
his feet by the contagion of example. To speculative fever and to
made panic he is rather immune. Because he is less mobile than the
American and does not shift from one thing to another, he is more
apt to gain skill and turn out good work. Then, too, he is not so
keen to get on that he does not find the artist's enjoyment and
pride in the practice of his craft. In a word, the Germans act in
American society as a neutral substance moderating the action of
an overlively ferment. For the universal eagerness to be "wide
awake" and "up to date" has deposed habit, tradition, and external
authority as lords of life among us.

The German is lasting in his sympathies and his antipathies and
leisurely in his mental processes. It takes him long to make up his
mind and longer to get an idea out of his head. In his thinking
he tries to grasp more things at a time than does the Celt. Not
for him the simple logic that proceeds from one or two outstanding
factors in a situation and ignores all the rest. He wants to be
comprehensive and final where the Latin aims to be merely clear
and precise. It is this very complexity of thought that makes
the German often silent, his speech heavy or confused. But just
this relish for details and this passion for thoroughness make
him a born investigator. This is why, on the practical side, the
German-American has most distinguished himself in work that calls
for long and close observation, such as gardening, viticulture,
breeding, forestry, brewing, and the chemical industries.

Thirty years ago there was an outcry that the Germans were
introducing into this country the virus of anarchism and socialism.
It is now clear that German socialism, instead of being a shattering
type of thought, is in fact highly constructive. However bold
and iconoclastic he may be in his thinking, the German, with his
respect for authority, his slow reaction to wrong, and his love
of order and system, is a conservative by nature. The children of
revolutionary immigrants are milder than their fathers were; and the
German-Americans are now very far from leading the van of radicalism.

[Illustration:

  1826-30        8000

  1831-35       49000

  1836-40      109300

  1841-45      110000

  1846-50      337800

  1851-55      672400   POLITICAL REACTION IN GERMANY

  1856-60      316100   HARD TIMES IN UNITED STATES

  1861-65      242500   CIVIL WAR IN UNITED STATES

  1866-70      577600

  1871-75      532700

  1876-80      220200   HARD TIMES IN UNITED STATES

  1881-85     1031500 { MILITARISM AND OVERPOPULATION
                      {
  1886-90      548200 { IN
                      {
  1891-95      432600 { GERMANY

  1896-1900    120100   HARD TIMES IN UNITED STATES

  1901-05      214300

  1906-10      211400

Immigration from Germany, Netherlands, and Switzerland, 1826-1910]




CHAPTER IV

THE SCANDINAVIANS


Although Leif Ericson discovered America in the year 1000 A.D., his
countrymen made no serious use of his find until the latter part
of the nineteenth century. It is only sixty-four years since the
memorable visit of "the Swedish Nightingale," Jenny Lind, opened
our eyes to the existence of the Northern peoples. In fact, the
few thousands that about this time began to filter in were first
known as "Jenny Lind men." Now there are among us a million and a
quarter born in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, and, counting those of
Scandinavian parentage and grandparentage, it is safe to say that a
quarter of all this blood in the world is west of the Atlantic.

In 1874 the Icelanders celebrated the millennial anniversary of the
settlement of Iceland, and only year before last certain of our
fellow-citizens were commemorating the millennial anniversary of the
cession of Normandy to Rollo the Dane. In all the thousand years
since these colonizations, there has been no diffusion of Gothic
blood to compare with the settlement in this country of nearly two
million Scandinavian immigrants. Sweden has sent the most, but
Norway has contributed a larger proportion of her people than any
other country save Ireland. There are certainly half as many of
Norse blood here as there are in the fatherland, and they own six
times as much farming land. A Norwegian economist estimates that the
property owned by his compatriots in this country corresponds in
value to the entire national economy of Norway.

The crest of the Scandinavian wave passed thirty years ago.
The current runs still, but it is a flow of job-seekers rather
than of home-seekers. America is no longer so attractive to the
land-hungry; besides, their home conditions have greatly improved.
By their wonderful development of rural coöperation, the Danes have
made themselves the most envied of European peasant farmers. By
harnessing their waterfalls, the Norwegians have gained a basis for
new industries. The Swedes have drawn the power of half a million
horses from their streams, and their multiplying factories take on
about ten thousand new hands every year.


DISTRIBUTION OF SCANDINAVIAN BLOOD

The old Northwest, stretching from Detroit to Omaha, and thence
north to the boundary, has been the Scandinavian's "land of Goshen."
Here is the "New Sweden" that Gustavus Adolphus dreamed of when he
planned a Swedish colony on the Delaware. In 1850, when there were
only thirteen thousand of her race in that region, Frederika Bremer
then in St. Paul had the vision of a Cumæan sibyl:

     What a glorious new Scandinavia might not Minnesota become! Here
     would the Swede find again his clear, romantic lakes, the plains
     of Scania rich in corn, and the valleys of Norrland; here would
     the Norwegian find his rapid rivers, his lofty mountains, for I
     would include the Rocky Mountains and Oregon in the new kingdom;
     and both nations their hunting-fields and their fisheries. The
     Danes might here pasture their flocks and herds and lay out
     their farms on less misty coasts than those of Denmark.... The
     climate, the situation, the character of the scenery agree with
     our people better than that of any other of the American States.

It is a striking fulfilment of her prophecy that to-day a fifth of
the Scandinavian blood in the world is in this very region. Fifty
years ago Wisconsin led, with her great Norwegian contingent; then
Minnesota passed her, and later Illinois, with Chicago as the
lodestone. To-day two-fifths of the people of Minnesota are of
Scandinavian strain. Northern Iowa has a strong infusion of the
blood, while the Dakotas are deeply tinged. In 1870 four-fifths
of all our Scandinavians were in this region. The proportion fell
slowly to three-fourths in 1880, five-sevenths in 1890, two-thirds
in 1900, and three-fifths in 1910. Of late many have dropped
into the ranks of clanging industrialism between Pawtucket and
Pittsburgh, while the current of home-seekers into the new Northwest
has given Washington and Oregon as many Scandinavians as there are
in the Dakotas.


SOCIAL CHARACTERISTICS

Like the immigrants from Great Britain, the Scandinavians came with
a male preponderance of about three-fifths. About a quarter of them
were servants at home, a third were common laborers, and a sixth
were skilled laborers. They have brought far less skill than the
British, and distinctly less than the Germans and the Bohemians.

In point of _literacy_ they lead the world. One finds an illiterate
among every twenty German immigrants of more than fourteen years of
age. Of immigrants from other nations, one may find an illiterate
among every twenty-three Dutch, thirty-eight Irish, fifty-two Welsh,
fifty-nine Bohemians, seventy-seven Finns, one hundred English, and
one hundred and forty-three Scotch; but the proportion among those
who come from Scandinavia is _one in two hundred and fifty_. What a
contrast between these and the Lithuanians and South Italians, half
of whom are unable to read any language!

It is perhaps the strain of melancholy lurking in Northern blood
that gives our Scandinavians a tendency toward insanity slightly
in excess of the foreign-born as a whole, and decidedly greater
than that of Americans. In susceptibility to tuberculosis they make
a worse showing than any others among our foreign-born save the
Irish. They die of it oftener than do their children born in this
country, but even these suffer twice the losses of their American
neighbors. But the scourge is still worse in the old country;
so very likely we have here not a race weakness, but a penalty
for unhygienic conditions. In the bitter North, with the forests
disappearing, people came to dread fresh air, and the trouble began
as soon as the open hearth gave way to the tight stove.

In our Northwest many Scandinavians board up or nail down their
windows for the winter, and in such homes one appreciates the
_mot_ evoked by the query, "Why is the country air so pure?" The
answer is, "Because the farmers keep all the bad air shut up in
their houses." The second generation are taking to ventilation,
and in their children very likely the Hyperboreans' horror of
fresh air will have wholly disappeared, and with it their special
susceptibility to the white plague.

The study of several thousand mixed marriages in Minneapolis has
led Professor Albert Jenks of the University of Minnesota to this
conclusion: "The Irish blood tends to increase fecundity, and the
Scandinavian blood tends to decrease fecundity, of other peoples in
amalgamation." Is this contrast due to the Scandinavians being so
fore-looking, whereas the Irish give little heed to the future; to
the fact that the Scandinavians are the purest Protestants, while
the Irish are the purest Roman Catholics; or to the coming together
in the Scandinavians of prudence and Protestantism with a high
status of women? At any rate, such caution in family is startling
when one recalls that old Scandinavia was the mother hive of the
swarms of barbarians that kept South Europeans in dread a thousand
years, or notes what William Penn found among the Swedes on the
Delaware two hundred and thirty years ago: "They have fine children
and almost every house full; rare to find one of them without three
or four boys and as many girls; some six, seven, or eight sons."

The primitive man commits crime from passion; the developed man
commits more of his crimes from cupidity. Proverbially honest, the
Scandinavian is less prone than the American to seek his living by
crookedness. The gamut of exploit that reaches from the _Artful
Dodger_ to _Colonel Sellers_ is alien to him. Nor is he subject to
the wild impulses that often crop out in the Italian or the Slav.
Much of his crime springs from disorderly conduct, and drink must
bear most of the blame, for on the Scandinavian nature liquor has a
disastrous effect.


ALCOHOLISM AMONG THE SCANDINAVIANS

Pytheas of Marseilles, the explorer who about the time of Alexander
the Great gave the world its first news of Norway, said that the
people of Thule made from honey "a very pleasant drink." This
beverage could hardly have touched the right spot, for when the
product of the still reached the Thulites they fell upon it with
the joyous abandon of the inexperienced. A century ago Scandinavia
was the home of hard drinkers. Even yet, in our cities, the
"toughest" saloons are kept by old-time Norsemen, who left the
fatherland before it began to dry out. One hears a proverb which
runs, "What won't the German do for money and the Swede for whisky!"
As charity seekers and hospital patients, our Scandinavians are not
so alcoholic as the British, but more so than the Teutons. More
and more, however, they come to us temperate, and strong believers
in sumptuary legislation; for within a generation Scandinavia has
become the Sahara whence issue the desiccating simooms--Gothenburg
system, _samlag_ system, etc.,--which have taken much "wet"
territory off the map.


FAVORITE OCCUPATIONS

Rugged Norway freezes into the souls of her sons a sense of the
preciousness of level, fertile land, and there are no great cities
to infect the imagination of her country dwellers. What wonder,
then, that in 1900 nearly four-fifths of our Norwegians were outside
the cities, most of them sticking to the soil like limpets to a
rock! In 1900 half of them were tillers, and sixty-three per cent.
of their grown sons. For the rest, they are to be found in the
forecastles of the great lakes, in the copper and iron mines of
upper Michigan, in the coal-mines of Iowa, in Northern lumber-camps,
where they wield another pattern of ax than did their forbears,
who, eight centuries ago, were known as "ax-bearers" in the Eastern
emperor's body-guard. They work in the building trades, on the
railroads, in the flour-mills of the wheat centers, and in the
furniture-mills, the plow-wagon-and-implement factories of the
hardwood belt. From his vast new circle of opportunities, the
Norwegian immigrant chooses those that enable him to continue his
life at home. He insists on getting his living in connection with
soil, water, and wood. In the East he shuns mill drudgery, but
shines as a builder. A fourth part of the Norwegian wage-earners
in New York are carpenters, while none are on the farms. In Iowa
two-thirds are on the farms, and only seven per cent. are in the
building trades.

Through the occupational choices of our Danes, one can catch a
glimpse of the lush meadows of Jutland. Forty per cent. of them are
on the farm, ten per cent. are laborers, and four per cent. are
carpenters. In butter-making and dairying they are six times as
numerous as in the general work of the country; in cabinet-making
and before the mast they are three and one-half times as strong.
As stock-raisers and drovers, the second generation are five and
one-half times as strong as they are in other lines.

Coming from an industrial country, the Swedes bring skill, and show
no marked bent for agriculture. Only thirty per cent. of them are at
the plow-tail; of their sons, forty-three per cent. The rest will be
carpenters, miners, and quarrymen, railroad employees, machinists,
iron- and steel-workers, tailors, and teamsters. Although they
form only an eightieth of the army of bread-winners, one out of
twelve iron-workers, one out of fourteen cabinet-makers, one out of
twenty-one boatmen and sailors, and one out of twenty-five tailors
is a Swede. The Swedish aristocratic view of callings is perhaps
responsible for the fact that the immigrants' sons are three times
as successful in getting "white-handed" jobs as the immigrants, and
are much keener for such work than the sons of our Norwegians.

A like difference is visible in the choices of the daughters.
Between the first generation and the second the proportion in
the "ladylike" jobs increases from 3 per cent. to 13.5 per cent.
among the Swedes; from 4.2 per cent. to 9.8 per cent. among the
Norwegians. While the proportion of servants and waitresses falls
from 61.5 per cent. to 44.5 per cent. among the Swedes, it actually
rises from 46 per cent. to 48 per cent. among the Norwegians. Among
the former there is a more eager flight from kitchen to factory. On
the other hand, the affinity of a democratic people for education
reveals itself in the fact that in both generations the Norwegian
women are decidedly more likely to be teachers than the Swedish
women.


ASSIMILATION

It may be true that "every Sunday Norwegian is preached in more
churches in America than in Norway," still, no immigrants of
foreign speech assimilate so quickly as the Scandinavians. They
never pullulate in slums or stagnate in solid rural settlements. Of
10,200 families that have been studied in seven of our great cities,
it was found that the 148 Swedish families had the most dwellings
of five and six rooms, the largest incomes, the best housekeeping,
the best command of English, and the highest proportion of voters
among the men. The Scandinavians have not braced themselves against
assimilation, as have the Germans, with their _Deutschtum_. Not
being beer-bibbers, and warned by their desperate home struggle,
they will not stand with the Teutons for "personal liberty" on the
question of drink. The anti-liquor sentiment is very strong among
them, and in the Minnesota legislature nearly all the support for
county option is Scandinavian. Politically, the Norwegians are more
active than the Swedes, and they have been insurgent ever since they
formed in the Northwest the backbone of so American a movement as
Populism.

Among the Scandinavians the spirit of self-improvement is very
strong. No other foreign-born people respond so eagerly to
night-school opportunities. Farmers' institutes command better
attendance and attention where they abound than in straight-American
neighborhoods. On a holiday celebration the address attracts more
Scandinavians, the ball-game or the fireworks, more natives. As
patient listeners, they match our Puritan forefathers. No other
people take more pride in giving their children a chance. In the
words of a Minnesota schoolman, "They are the best people in the
State to appreciate education and to want it improved." Unlike the
Germans, they have left no mark on American culture. Our ideas and
institutions have not been changed by their coming. What they have
done is to quicken our interest in the literature of the North, and
to win for it academic recognition. A department of Scandinavian is
found not only in Harvard and Yale, but also in a dozen universities
all the way from Chicago to Seattle. Even the high schools in
Minneapolis and elsewhere find place for Scandinavian.

[Illustration: Distribution of Scandinavians and natives of
Scandinavian Parentage--1910.]


REACTION TO AMERICA

The commonplace Knud or Swen brings us a mind pinched by the petty
parochialism of little countries on the world's byways. Coming from
some valley-closet in a mountainous country, only three per cent. of
which is fit for the plow, the Norse immigrant is here spiritually
enlarged, like the native of a box-cañon let out into a plain, or
the cove-dweller who comes to live by the open sea. In a log hut by
a lonely fjord in Trondhjem, or on a dreary moor in Finmark, the
story of a Norse peasant lad rising to be governor or senator in
this country thrills as did, near a thousand years ago, the romantic
tale of some Varangian back from service in the emperor's guard at
Constantinople.

In the home-land, a distinguished Norwegian-American, Dr. Wergeland,
finds:

     Such an oppressive spiritual atmosphere of narrow-minded
     intolerance, of unloving readiness to raise teacup storms, of
     insolence, private and political, of clerical and æsthetic
     arrogance, that the Norseman, though scarcely knowing why, longs
     to get away from it all and to breathe a fresher, sweeter air.
     No wonder the people emigrate. There is a peculiar hardness and
     inflexibility in the Norseman's nature, and the mild virtues
     of forbearance grow but sparsely in his surroundings. This is
     perhaps the reason why the Norse immigrant brings to his new
     homestead for the first four or five years nothing but an open
     mouth and a silent tongue--speechless astonishment. And this
     is the reason that to come back to Norway, after spending some
     years abroad, is so often like coming from open fields into
     narrow alleys.

In this strain writes a North Dakota pioneer:

     What of change the new-comer notices in us American Norsemen
     is good manners; the respect shown to women; the small class
     distinctions between rich and poor, high and low; and, finally,
     the quickness and practical insight into work and business.

Another pioneer, after revisiting Norway, writes:

     I was often surprised to find that persons who had never seen me
     before took me at once for an American. It seems that even the
     expression of one's face is greatly changed here. During this
     visit I discovered that my mode of thinking and my spiritual
     life had changed so much during my thirteen years in America
     that I did not feel quite at home with my childhood friends....
     The Norwegian who has lived a while in America is more civilized
     than if he had not been here. He has seen more, experienced
     more, thought more, and all this has opened his eyes and
     broadened his view. He is more wide-awake, lives a richer life,
     and is in a closer correspondence with his surroundings. His
     sympathies are widened, and he takes more interest in what is
     going on in the world.


CONTRASTS AMONG SCANDINAVIANS

It will not do to shuffle all our Scandinavians into one deck. The
Danes are courteous and pleasure-loving, though moody, and they run
to moderation in virtues as in vices. The Swedes bear the impress
of a society that has long known aristocracy, refinement, and
industrialism. They are more polished in manner than the Norwegians,
although the humble betray a servility which grates upon Americans.
Many show a sociability and a love of pleasure worthy of "the French
of the North." They bring, too, a love of letters, and I am told
that most of the servant-girls write verse. The editor of a Swedish
weekly receives very well written poems and contributions from
his readers. Learning stands high with the Swedes, and since John
Ericsson they have sent us many fine technical men. Only lately
their great chemist Arrhenius hazarded the prediction that, owing
to the tendency of American men of ability to go into business, our
university chairs will some day be filled with scholars of German
and Scandinavian blood.

The Swede is more melancholy than the Norseman, and his letters to
friends in the old country are full of the expression of feeling. He
has the temperament for pietism, which has always been marked among
the Swedish-Americans because they have been dissenters rather than
adherents of the state church. Formerly the Swedes came from the
country, and were conservative; but of late they have been coming
from the cities, and are of a radical and even socialistic spirit.

The Norwegian bears the stamp of a more primitive life. Squeezed
into the few roods betwixt mountains and fjord, he has eked out the
scanty yield of his farm by grazing the high glacier-fed meadows
and gleaning the spoil of the sea. The need which ten centuries ago
drove the Vikings to harry Europe, to-day forces their descendants
into all the navies of the world. Granite and frost have made the
Norse immigrant rough-mannered, reserved, and undemonstrative,
cautious in speech, austere in church life, and little given to
recreation. German _Gemüthlichkeit_ is not in him, nor has he the
Irishman's sociability. Often he is as taciturn as an Indian, and
the lonely farm-houses on the prairie, where not a needless word is
uttered the livelong day, contribute many young people to the city
maëlstrom.

The Norwegian immigrant has the high spirit of a people that has
never known the steam-roller of feudalism, of peasants who held
their farms by allodial tenure, and could order the king himself
off their land. He has more pride of nationality than the Swede,
gets into our politics sooner, and is more aggressive in improving
his opportunities. He has the name of being truer to his friends and
to his word. Firms declare that they lose less by his bad debts.
"The Swede," remarks an educator, "will show the white feather and
desert you in a pinch; but not the Norwegian." A mine "boss" thinks
he can distinguish Scandinavians by type. "The smooth, white-haired
fellows," he says, "have a yellow streak in them; but the dark, or
sandy-haired fellows, with a rough skin and rugged features, are
reliable." In the Northwest, the nickname "Norsky" is more apt to be
used in a good-natured way than the term "Swede."


INTELLECTUAL ABILITY

Since our editors and public men tender each nationality of
immigrants--as soon as they have money and votes--nothing but
lollipops of compliment, one is loth to proffer the pungent olive of
truth. But it is a fact that many who have to do with the Americans
of Scandinavian parentage question whether marked ability so often
presents itself among them as among certain other strains. The
weight of testimony indicates that resourcefulness and intellectual
initiative are rarer among them than among those of German descent.
Teachers find their children "rather slow," although few fall
behind. Scandinavian students do well, but they are "plodders."
They beat the Irish in close application, but less often are they
called "brilliant."

Of 19,000 Americans recognized in "Who's Who in America," 332 were
born in Germany, 151 in Ireland, 68 in France, 54 in Sweden, 42 in
Russia, 41 in the Netherlands, 34 in Switzerland, 33 in Austria,
30 in Norway, 28 in Italy, and 14 in Denmark. The Scandinavians
have reached prominence far less often than the French, Dutch, and
Swiss Americans, and not so often even as the Germans. To the first
thousand men of science in America, our Swedish fellow-citizens
contribute at the rate of 5.2 per million as against 1.8 for the
Irish, 7.1 for the Germans, 7.4 for those born in Russia, and 10.4
for those born in Austria-Hungary.

It is a fair question, then, whether our Scandinavians represent
the flower of their people as well as the root and stalk. No doubt
in venturesomeness they surpass those in like circumstances who
stayed at home. No doubt they brought in full measure the forceful
character of the race; but, thanks to our bland, syrupy way of
appraising the naturalized foreign-born, the question of comparative
brain power never comes up.

Now, oppression or persecution had very little to do with the
outflow from Scandinavia. The immigrants came for a better living,
for, in the main, they have been servants and common laborers, with
a sprinkling of small farmers and a fair contingent of craftsmen. We
have had very few representatives of the classes enjoying access to
higher education, business, the professions, and the public service.
Having fair prospects at home, the more capable families very likely
contributed fewer emigrants than the rest. A professor of Swedish
parentage tells me that he has noticed that the successful Swedes he
meets traveling in this country are wholly different in physiognomy
from the immigrants. The faces here strike him as duller and less
regular than the faces of people in Sweden. Other Swedish-Americans,
however, contend that formerly caste barriers in the fatherland so
blocked the rise of gifted commoners that the immigrant stream is
as rich in natural ability as is the Swedish people at home. Rugged
Norway has less to hold at home the more capable stocks; but still
one meets with candid Norwegian-Americans who think our million of
Norse blood represent the brawn rather than the brain of their folk.


MENTAL AND PRACTICAL TRAITS

Norse mythology is to Celtic mythology what a Yukon forest is to
an Orinoco jungle. In the Sagas of Iceland the fancy never runs
riot as it does in the legends of Connemara or Brittany. It is not
surprising, then, that our Scandinavians are not distinguished for
visual imagination. Professors notice that the lads of this breed
are slow to grasp the principle of the machinery about the college
of agriculture, and need a diagram to supplement oral description
of a ventilating system. To them even a drawing is a maze of
lines rather than a picture. A physical director working among
Scandinavians labored in vain to get his trustees to imagine from
the blue prints how the new gymnasium would look. Not until the
scaffolding was down were his gymnasts satisfied that there would
be "room to do the giant swing." His boy scouts had no faith in a
selected camp-site till the brush was actually cleared from it. They
lacked "the mind's eye."

"It is not enough," remarks a settlement head, "to show rich Nils or
Lars 'how the other half lives'; you've got to clinch your appeal
by showing him how the other half _ought_ to live." Says a social
worker, "I picture to the poor Slovak an eight-room, steam-heated
house as a goal, and he will work for it; but the poor Swede can't
imagine such a house as his own, so I have to talk to him of the
four-room house he will one day possess."

It is said that, as merchant, the Scandinavian puts little
visualizing into his advertisements, and is slow to catch the vision
of a community prosperity through team-work. As business man, he
is a "stand-patter," able to run a going concern, but without the
American's power to anticipate developments and to plant a business
where none exists. As farmer, he is not so far-sighted as the
German. He will burn off the growth on his cut-over land till the
humus has been consumed, or wear out his fields with some profitable
but exhausting crop, like tobacco. As investor, he is the opposite
of the imaginative, speculative American, for large, remote
profits do not appeal to him. As labor leader, he lacks vision and
idealism. On the stump he does not address the imagination as does
the Hibernian spellbinder. As advocate, he makes a hard-headed plea
without sentiment, and as after-dinner speaker he lacks in wit and
fancy.

[Illustration: Typical Norwegian Boy]

[Illustration: Typical Swedish Girl]

So little sociable are the Scandinavians that it is said "ice-water
runs in their veins." Even liquor will not start the current of
fraternal feeling. They care little for the social side of their
labor-unions, and neglect the regular meetings. They do not warm
up to an employer who treats them "right." Without the happy art
of mixing and fraternizing, these sons of the North do not shine
as bar-tenders, salesmen, canvassers, commercial travelers, or
life-insurance solicitors. As street-car conductors in Minneapolis
they are said to be less helpful and polite than the American or the
Irish conductors of St. Paul. Teachers of this blood do not easily
attach their pupils to them; while the children, instead of being
inspired by an audience, as are the Irish, become tongue-tied. Often
one hears a teacher lament, "I can't get anything _out_ of them."

There is sweetness in the Scandinavian nature, but you reach it deep
down past flint. The late Governor Johnson of Minnesota drew people
because he had imagination and tenderness--traits none too common
among his people. They are undemonstrative in the family, and it
is not surprising that their youth on the farms are restless from
heart-hunger. Besides, there is dearth of recreation. The Norwegian
has his violin, but the Swedish folk-dances we hear so much about
were not brought in by the immigrants. They lack the German
_Männerchor_, _Turnverein_, and _Schuetzenfest_. It is unusual to
find them organizing athletic sports. Their social gatherings center
in the church, which of course acts as a damper on the spirits of
the young. They love fun, to be sure, but have not the knack of
making it. Shut up within themselves, hard to reach, slow to kindle,
and dominated by an austere hell-fire theology, they are too often
the prey of somber moods and victims of suicide and insanity.

An experienced social worker finds selfishness the besetting sin of
the Scandinavians he deals with. If a settlement class get a room or
a camp, they object to any others using it. In any undertaking they
have in common with other nationalities they try to get the best
for themselves. They withhold aid from the distressed of another
nationality, while the Irish will respond generously to the same
appeal. A labor leader notices that the Scandinavian working-men
are "hard givers." A kindergartener who sent out Christmas gifts to
twenty poor Scandinavian families received thanks from only one. A
society gave relief to 260 such families during the winter, and the
number who expressed gratitude could be counted on the fingers of
one hand. One clergyman declared that his people are not generous in
supporting their own charities.

On the other hand, an observer remarks: "For a suffering _person_,
circulate your subscription paper among the Irish; for a good
_cause_, circulate it among the Scandinavians." In other words,
the goodness of these people is from the head rather than from the
heart. "If I can get him to see it as his _duty_," testifies a
charity worker, "the Scandinavian will go almost any length." Credit
men rank them with the Germans as the surest pay. Insurance agents
say no other people are so faithful in paying their premiums "on the
nail." If there is a suspicious fire in a store, the owner's name
never ends in "son." In Minnesota there are more coöperative stores,
creameries, and elevators in the Scandinavian communities than in
the American.

The Norwegians have been virile politically, and their politics has
reflected moral ideas. They look upon public office as a trust,
not a means of livelihood. In the days of Populism they were more
open-minded than the Americans. In Wisconsin they have furnished
a stanch support for the constructive policies which have drawn
upon that State national attention. In the critical roll-calls in
the Minnesota legislature all but one or two of the Scandinavian
members are found on the "right side." The "interests" have the
Germans,--brewing being an "interest,"--the Irish, and many
Americans.

The truth is, their slow reaction gives these people the right
psychology for self-government. In politics they are "good losers."
They are not to be stampeded by fiery rhetoric or mass hysteria.
They have the self-control to right abuses by orderly constitutional
methods. In the Chicago anarchist trials the defense was careful
to keep Scandinavians out of the jury-box. Among the Scandinavian
peoples riots, barricades, and street turbulence have played no
part in the redress of political grievances. Ideas of right lie at
the base of their social order, while habit and sentiment count for
less than they do among South Europeans. So, while our Scandinavian
strain may lack the qualities for political leadership, it provides
an excellent, cool-blooded, self-controlled citizenship for the
support of representative government.

[Illustration:

  1841-45      4900

  1846-50      9500

  1851-55     15900

  1856-60      9200

  1861-65     16700

  1866-70    108800

  1871-75    119600

  1876-80    123300   HARD TIMES IN U.S.

  1881-85    352300 { INTRODUCTION OF MACHINE POWER
                    {
  1886-90    304200 { ON SCANDINAVIAN
                    {
  1891-95    244600 { FARMS

  1896-1900  127000   HARD TIMES IN U.S.

  1901-05    291600 { HYDRO-ELECTRIC INDUSTRIES
                    {
  1906-10    213700 { IN SCANDINAVIA

Immigration from Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, 1841-1910]

[Illustration: Distribution of Italians and natives of Italian
Parentage--1910]




CHAPTER V

THE ITALIANS


The immigration from Italy has shot up like Jonah's gourd. During
the last decade a fourth of our immigrants have been Italians, and
from being a twentieth part of our foreign-born, they have risen
to be a tenth. This freshet is not born of religious or political
oppression, for Italy enjoys a government on modern lines, created
by the efforts of patriots like Mazzini, Cavour, and Garibaldi.
The impulse that every year prompts from a quarter to a half of a
million Italians to wander oversea is purely economic. Ignorance and
the subjection of women cause blind multiplication, with the result
that the Italians are wresting their food from narrower plots than
any other European people. A population approximating that of all
our Atlantic States is trying to live from a space little greater
than the combined areas of New York and Georgia. Although Argentina
seconds the United States in absorbing the overflow, still, Italy's
population continually swells, her birth-rate is not sinking so
rapidly as her death-rate, and one sees no reason why the Italian
dusk should not in time quench what of the Celto-Teutonic flush
lingers in the cheek of the native American.


DISTRIBUTION THROUGHOUT THE UNITED STATES

Of our one and one-third million of Italians, the Northeast down
to Washington holds about three-fourths, while south and southwest
of the Capitol there are only three and a half per cent. The
middle West has sixteen per cent., and the quota of the Far West
is seven and a half per cent. For the most part, they are greatly
concentrated in cities. Roughly speaking, five-sixths of the
Italians in Delaware are in Wilmington; in Maryland, three-sevenths
are in Baltimore; in Illinois, three-eights are in Chicago; in
Nebraska, two-thirds are in Omaha; in Missouri, three-fifths are in
St. Louis; in Oregon, one-half are in Portland; in Pennsylvania,
one-half are in Philadelphia; in Louisiana, two-fifths are in
New Orleans; in Michigan, a third are in Detroit; and in Ohio, a
quarter are in Cleveland. In New York city are massed a third of a
million of Italians, one-fourth of all in the country. Although a
slow percolation into the rural districts is going on, this current
distributes immigrants very differently from the older streams that
debouched on the advancing frontier.


SOCIAL CHARACTERISTICS

Migratory job-hunters rather than home-seekers, the Italians are
loath to encumber themselves with their women. The women are only a
little more than one-fifth of the whole, nor do they come here more
freely as time goes on. A natural consequence of leaving families
behind is a huge return current _to_ Italy, amounting to a third of
the arrivals _from_ Italy.

More than half of our British immigrants are skilled. Of the
Italian arrivals, one out of eight is skilled, one out of four is
a farm-laborer, one out of three is a common laborer, and one in
two hundred and fifty has a profession. In a word, two-thirds are
of rural origin. The illiteracy of the Italian immigrants more than
fourteen years of age is forty-seven per cent.; so that of the two
million illiterates admitted to this country 1899-1909, nearly
one-half hailed from Italy.


NORTH ITALIANS AND SOUTH ITALIANS

The fact that the emigrants from the north of Italy wander chiefly
to South America, where industrially they dominate, while the
emigrants from central and southern Italy come to this country,
where they are dominated, makes it important to remember that in
race advancement the North Italians differ from the rest of their
fellow-countrymen. In the veins of the broadhead people of Piedmont,
Lombardy, and Venetia runs much Northern blood--Celtic, Gothic,
Lombard, and German. The other Italians are of the long-head, dark,
Mediterranean race, with no small infusion of Greek, Saracen, and
African blood in the Calabrians and Sicilians. Rarely is there so
wide an ethnic gulf between the geographical extremes of a nation as
there is between Milan and Palermo.

The Italians themselves have set forth these contrasts in the
sharpest relief. In an elaborate treatise, Professor Niceforo shows
that blue eyes and fair hair occur twice as often among the North
Italians as among the people south of Rome; that their understatured
are eight per cent. of the whole as against twenty per cent. for
the South Italians; and that they show a greater frequency of
high foreheads and a smaller frequency of low brows. They have a
third of the illiteracy of the South, twice the school attendance,
thrice the number of higher students; and while a clear third of
the southern students fail in their examinations, less than a
quarter of the northerners fail. Northern Italy is twice as well
off in teachers and libraries, five times as productive in book
publishing, has twice as many voters to the hundred inhabitants,
and buys half as many lottery-tickets as the South. The astonishing
dearth of literary and artistic production in the South ought to
confound those optimists who, identifying "Italian" with "Venetian"
and "Tuscan," anticipate that the Italian infusion will one day
make the American stock bloom with poets and painters. The figures
of Niceforo show that the provinces that contribute most to our
immigration _have been utterly sterile in creators of beauty_.

In nothing are the two peoples so unlike as in their crimes. While
northern Italy leads in fraud and chicane, southern Italy reveals
a rank growth of the ferocious crimes that go with a primitive
stage of civilization. The contrast is between force and fraud,
violence and cunning. The South produces five times as much homicide
as the North, four times as much brigandage, three times as many
assaults, and five times as many seizures or destructions of
property. On the whole, it has from three to four times the violence
of the North, while its obscene crimes, which constitute an index
of sensuality, are thrice as numerous. As for Sicilians, they are
scourged by seven times the homicide, four times the brigandage, and
four times the obscene crime suffered by an equal number of North
Italians.

[Illustration: Photograph by Hine

Italian Gypsy Mother and Child]

[Illustration: Photograph by Hine

Italian Woman of Greek or Albanian Ancestry]

Although less advanced, the Italians from the valley of the Po are
racially akin to the Swiss and the South Germans. As immigrants,
their superiority to other Italians is generally recognized. I have
yet to meet an observer who does not rate the North Italian among
us as more intelligent, reliable, and progressive than the South
Italian. We know from statistics that he is less turbulent, less
criminal, less transient; he earns more, rises higher, and acquires
citizenship sooner. Yet only a fifth of our Italians are from the
North. It is the backward and benighted provinces from Naples to
Sicily that send us the flood of "gross little aliens" who gave
Henry James, on revisiting Boston, the melancholy vision "of a huge
applied sponge--a sponge saturated with the foreign mixture and
passed over almost everything I remembered and might still have
recovered."


VARIETY OF OCCUPATIONS

Being new-comers, the Italians are doing the heavy, unskilled work
which was once the prerogative of the Irish. The shovel is now as
firmly associated in our minds with 'Tonio as formerly with Barney.
The North Italians go much into mine and quarry and silk-mill, but
the others stick close to railroad, street, and construction work.
Of our railroads it has been said that "Italians build them, Irish
run them, and Jews own them." Nearer to the truth, perhaps, is the
New York _mot_, "Houses nowadays are built by Italians, owned by
Jews, and paid for by Irish tenants." Being small and vegetarian,
the Italians are not preferred in earthwork for their physical
strength, but because of their endurance of heat, cold, wet, and
muck. As one contractor puts it, "they can stand the gaff."

Although the South Italians are numerous in the manufacture of boots
and shoes, cigars, glass, woolen goods, and clothing, some employers
refuse the males for "inside work" because they have the reputation
of being turbulent. Their noteworthy absence from the rolling-mills
is attributed to the fact that they lack the nervous stability
needed for seizing a white-hot piece of iron with a pair of tongs.
The phlegmatic Slav stands up to such work.

In the trades, the Italians crop up numerously as bakers,
barbers, cobblers, confectioners, tailors, street musicians,
scissors-grinders and marble-cutters. A great number become
hucksters and peddlers of such characteristic wares as fruits
and plaster casts. It is the Italian from the North, especially
the Genoese, who brings native commercial capacity and becomes a
wholesale or commission merchant in fruits and vegetables, while the
Neapolitan is still fussing with his banana-stand. Thanks to their
race genius, the Italian musicians and teachers of music among us
bid fair to break the musical monopoly of the German-Americans.

In one province of southern Italy not a plow exists, and the women
wield the hand implements beside the men. It is not strange that
immigrants with such experience do well here in truck-farming and
market-gardening. Those who engage in real agriculture settle
chiefly in colonies, for the voluble, gregarious Italians cannot
endure the chill loneliness of the American homestead. They follow
their bent for intensive farming, and would hardly know how to
handle more than fifteen or twenty acres. Few of them are up to
ordinary extensive farming. As one observer says, "They haven't the
head for it."

Although Italians are making a living on the cut-over pine-lands
of northern Wisconsin, the rocky hills of New England, the sandy
barrens of New Jersey, and the muck soil of western New York,
their love of sunshine is not dead. The cane, cotton, and tobacco
fields of the South attract them. More than half of the Italians
in Louisiana are on the plantations. Half of the sixty thousand
in California are in vineyard and orchard. The famed Italian-Swiss
colony at Asti employs a thousand men to help it make wine under a
_cielo sereno_ like that of Italy. Many a fisherman who has cast his
net in the Gulf of Genoa now strains the waters of San Francisco Bay.

There are two-score rural colonies of Italians in the South, and
the settlements at Bryan, Texas, and Sunnyside and Tontitown,
Arkansas, are well known. Italians have been welcomed to the South
by planters dissatisfied with <DW64> labor or desirous of deriving
a return from their raw land. As a cotton raiser, the Italian has
excelled the <DW64> at every point. When it was found, however,
that thrifty Pietro insisted on buying land after his second crop
as tenant, whereas the black tenant will go on forever letting
his superintending white landlord draw an income from him, the
enthusiasm of the planters cooled. Then, too, a fear has sprung up
lest the Italians, being without the southern white man's strong
race feeling, should mix with the <DW64>s and create a hybrid. The
South, therefore, is less eager for Italian immigrants than it was,
and the legislatures of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia
have recorded their sense of the undesirableness of this element.


CHARACTERISTIC VICES

The peoples from the Azores to Armenia are well-nigh immune to the
seduction of alcohol; so that if this be the test of desirableness,
it will be easy to part the sheep from the goats. Certain American
sentimentalists go into raptures over the "sobriety" of the new
immigrants, and to such we may as well concede first as last that
there would be no liquor problem here if abstemious Portuguese had
landed at Jamestown instead of hard-drinking English; if temperate
Rumanians had settled the colonies instead of thirsty Germans and
Scotch-Irish; and if sober, coffee-drinking Turks had peopled
the West instead of bibulous Hibernians and Scandinavians. The
proportion of Italian charity cases due to drink is only a sixth of
that for foreign-born cases, and a seventh of that for cases among
native Americans. Alcoholics occur among the Italians in the charity
hospitals from a tenth to a twentieth as often as among North
Europeans. Still, American example and American strain are telling
on the habits of the Italians, and in the Italian home the bottle of
"rock and rye" is seen with increasing frequency by the side of the
bottle of Chianti.

Bachelors in the pick-and-shovel brigade will have their diversions,
so it is not surprising that the Italians, like the abstemious
Chinese, are addicted to gambling. Games of chance flourish in their
saloons, and many a knife-thrust has come out of a game of cards. At
home the state lottery has whetted the taste for gambling. In the
Neapolitan the intoxication of the lottery takes the place occupied
by alcoholic intoxication in the Anglo-Saxon. When one learns that
on an average the Neapolitan risks $3.15 a year in the lottery, six
times as much as the average Italian, one does not wonder that the
immigrant hankers to put his money on something.


VIOLENCE IN CRIME

For all the great majority of the Italian immigrants are peaceable
and industrious, no other element matches them in propensity for
personal violence. In homicide, rape, blackmail, and kidnapping they
lead the foreign-born. Says the Immigration Commission: "The Italian
criminals are largest in numbers and create most alarm by the
violent character of their offenses in this country." Among moderns,
gainful offenses occur from three to seven times as frequently as
crimes of violence. The medievalism of the South Italians appears
from the fact that they commit more deeds of personal violence than
gainful offenses.

Browning, who knew the Italians, expresses this cheerful alacrity
in murder when, in "The Ring and the Book," the _Pope_ tells of the
four "bright-eyed, black-haired boys" _Count Guido_ hired for his
bloody work:

    Murder me some three people, old and young,
    Ye never heard the names of--and be paid
    So much. And the whole four accede at once.
    Demur? Do cattle bidden march or halt?

         . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

    All is done purely for the pay--which earned,
    And not forthcoming at the instant, makes
    Religion heresy, and the lord o' the land
    Fit subject for a murder in his turn.
    The patron with cut throat and rifled purse,
    Deposited i' the roadside ditch, his due,
    Naught hinders each good fellow trudging home
    The heavier by a piece or two in poke,
    And so with new zest to the common life,
    Mattock and spade, plow-tail and wagon-shaft
    Till some such other piece of luck betide.

It was frequently stated to the members of the Immigration
Commission in southern Italy that crime had greatly diminished
in many communities because most of the criminals had gone to
America. One Italian official at Messina stated that several years
ago southern Italy was a hot-bed of crime, but that now very
few criminals were left. When asked as to their whereabouts, he
replied, "Why, they are all in the United States." From the Camorra,
that vast spider-web of thieves and prostitutes by whom life and
politics in Naples are controlled, have come thousands who find
the hard-working Italian immigrants a richer field of exploitation
than any field open at home. Still more harassing is the Mafia, by
means of which Sicilians contrive to ignore police and courts and
to secure justice in their own way. A legacy of Spanish domination
and Spanish arrogance is the sense of _omertà_, or manliness, which
holds it dastardly to betray to justice even one's deadliest foe. To
avenge one's wrongs oneself, and never to appeal to law, is a part
of Sicilian honor.

In an Italian quarter are men who never work, yet who have
plenty of money. "No," they say, "we do not work. Work does not
agree with us. We have friends who work and give us money. Why
not?" It is these parasites who commit most of the crime. Their
honest fellow-countrymen shrink from them, yet, if one of them is
arrested, some make it a point of honor to swear him off, while all
scrupulously forget anything against him. Thanks to this perverse
idea of "honor," an Italian murder may be committed in the street
in broad daylight, with dozens looking on, yet a few minutes
later every spectator will deny to the police that he has seen
anything. This highbinder contempt for law is reinforced by sheer
terrorism. It is said that often in our courts the sudden wilting
of a promising Italian witness has been brought about by the secret
giving of the "death-sign," a quick passing of the hand across the
throat as if cutting.

The American, with his ready resort to the vigilance committee, is
amazed that a whole community should let itself thus be bullied by
a few miscreants known to all. Nothing of the sort has ever been
tolerated by North European immigrants. The secret lies in the
inaptness of the South Italians for good team work. Individualistic
to the marrow, they lack the gift of pulling together, and have
never achieved an efficient cooperating unit larger than the family.

General Theodore E. Bingham, former Police Commissioner of New
York, estimated that there are in that city not less than 3000
desperadoes from southern Italy, "among them as many ferocious
and desperate men as ever gathered in a modern city in time of
peace--medieval criminals who must be dealt with under modern law."
In 1908 he stated: "Crimes of blackmailing, blowing up of shops and
houses, and kidnapping of their countrymen have become prevalent
among Italian residents of the city to an extent that cannot be much
longer tolerated." It is obvious that if our legal system is called
upon to cope with a great volume of such crime for a long time, it
will slough off certain Anglo-Saxon features and adopt the methods
which alone avail in Italy, namely, state police, registry system,
"special surveillance" and "admonition."

[Illustration: Photograph by Hine

Group of Italian Immigrants Lunching in Old Railroad Waiting-Room,
Ellis Island]


ASSIMILATION WITH AMERICANS

Not being transients, the North Italians do not resist Americanizing
influences. The Genoese, for example, come not to earn wages, but
to engage in business. They shun the Italian "quarter," mix with
Americans, and Anglicize their names. Mariani becomes Merriam; Abata
turns to Abbey; Garberino softens to Gilbert; while Campana suffers
a "sea change" into Bell. In the produce-markets they deal with
Americans, and as high-class saloon-keepers they are forging past
Michael and Gustaf.

But the South Italians remain nearly as aloof as did the Cantonese
who built the Central Pacific Railway. Navvies who leave for Naples
when the ground freezes, and return in April, who huddle in a
"camp" or a box-car, or herd on some "<DW55> Flat," are not really
_in_ America. In a memorial to the acting mayor of New York, the
Italian-American Civic League speaks of the "great civically inert
mass" of their countrymen in New York, and declares, "By far the
largest part of the Italians of this city have lived a life of
their own, almost entirely apart from the American environment."
"In one street," writes Signor Pecorini, "will be found peasants
from one Italian village; in the next street the place of origin is
different, and distinct are manners, customs, and sympathies. Entire
villages have been transplanted from Italy to one New York street,
and with the others have come the doctor, the grocer, the priest,
and the annual celebration of the local patron saint."

Among the foreign-born, the Italians rank lowest in adhesion
to trade-unions, lowest in ability to speak English, lowest in
proportion naturalized after ten years' residence, lowest in
proportion of children in school, and highest in proportion of
children at work. Taking into account the innumerable "birds of
passage" without family or future in this country, it would be safe
to say that half, perhaps two-thirds, of our Italian immigrants are
_under_ America, not _of_ it. Far from being borne along with our
onward life, they drift round and round in a "Little Italy" eddy, or
lie motionless in some industrial pocket or crevice at the bottom of
the national current.


LACK OF MENTAL ABILITY

Steerage passengers from a Naples boat show a distressing frequency
of low foreheads, open mouths, weak chins, poor features, skew
faces, small or knobby crania, and backless heads. Such people
lack the power to take rational care of themselves; hence their
death-rate in New York is twice the general death-rate and thrice
that of the Germans. No other immigrants from Europe, unless it be
the Portuguese or the half-African Bravas of the Azores, show so low
an earning power as the South Italians. In our cities the head of
the household earns on an average $390 a year, as against $449 for
the North Italian, $552 for the Bohemian, and $630 for the German.
In silk-mill and wollen-mill, in iron-ore mining and the clothing
trade, no other nationality has so many low-pay workers; nor does
this industrial inferiority fade out in the least with the lapse of
time.

Their want of mechanical aptitude is often noticed. For example, in
a New England mill manned solely by South Italians only one out of
fifteen of the extra hands taken on during the "rush" season shows
sufficient aptitude to be worth keeping. The operatives require
closer supervision than Americans, and each is given only one thing
to do, so as to put the least possible strain on his attention.

If it be demurred that the ignorant, superstitious Neapolitan or
Sicilian, heir to centuries of Bourbon misgovernment, cannot be
expected to prove us his race mettle, there are his children, born
in America. What showing do they make? Teachers agree that the
children of the South Italians rank below the children of the North
Italians. They hate study, make slow progress, and quit school
at the first opportunity. While they take to drawing and music,
they are poor in spelling and language and very weak in abstract
mathematics. In the words of one superintendent, "they lack the
conveniences for thinking." More than any other children, they
fall behind their grade. They are below even the Portuguese and
the Poles, while at the other extremity stand the children of the
Scandinavians and the Hebrews. The explanation of the difference is
not irregularity of attendance, for among pupils attending three
fourths of the time, or more, the percentage of South Italians
retarded is fifty-six as against thirty-seven and a half per cent.
for the Russian-Hebrew children and twenty-nine per cent. for the
German. Nor is it due to the father's lack of American experience,
for of the children of South Italians who have been in this
country ten or more years sixty per cent. are backward, as against
about half that proportion among the Hebrews and the Germans.
After allowing for every disturbing factor, it appears that these
children, with the dusk of Saracenic or Berber ancestors showing
in their cheeks, are twice as apt to drop behind other pupils
of their age as are the children of the non-English-speaking
immigrants from northern Europe.

[Illustration: Photograph by Hine

Board of Special Inquiry, Ellis Island]

[Illustration: Photograph by Hine. Courtesy of The Survey

Utter Weariness

Bohemian Woman on East Side, New York, after the Day's Work]


TRAITS OF ITALIAN CHARACTER

The South Italian is volatile, unstable, soon hot, soon cool. Says
one observer, "The Italian vote here is a joke. Every candidate
claims it because they were 'for' him when he saw them. But the man
who talks last to them gets their vote." A charity worker declares
that they change their minds "three steps after they have left you."
It is not surprising that such people are unreliable. Credit men
pronounce them "very slippery," and say that the Italian merchants
themselves do not extend credit to them. It is generally agreed
that the South Italians lie more easily than North Europeans, and
utter untruth without that self-consciousness which makes us awkward
liars. "Most of my countrymen," says an educated Italian in the
consular service of his country, "disregard their promises unless it
is to their advantage to keep them." The man who "sweareth to his
own hurt and changeth not" is likely to be a German with his ideal
of _Treue_, an Englishman with his ideal of _truth_, or an American
with his ideal of _squareness_.

The Italians are sociable. Who can forget the joyous, shameless
gregariousness of Naples? As farmers they cluster, and seem to covet
the intimacies of the tenement-house. The streets of an Italian
quarter are lively with chatter and stir and folks sitting out in
front and calling to one another. In their family life they are
much less reserved than many other nationalities. With instinctive
courtesy they make the visitor welcome, and their quick and
demonstrative response to kindly advances makes them many friends.
Visiting nurses comment on the warm expressions of gratitude they
receive from the children of Italians whom they have helped.

Before the boards of inquiry at Ellis Island their emotional
instability stands out in the sharpest contrast to the self-control
of the Hebrew and the stolidity of the Slav. They gesticulate much,
and usually tears stand in their eyes. When two witnesses are being
examined, both talk at once, and their hands will be moving all the
time. Their glances flit quickly from one questioner to another,
and their eyes are the restless, uncomprehending eyes of the desert
Bedouin between walls. Yet for all this eager attention, they are
slow to catch the meaning of a simple question, and often it must be
repeated.

Mindful of these darting eyes and hands, one does not wonder that
the Sicilian will stab his best friend in a sudden quarrel over a
game of cards. The Slavs are ferocious in their cups, but none is so
ready with his knife when sober as the South Italian. In railroad
work other nationalities shun camps with many Italians. Contractors
are afraid of them because the whole force will impulsively quit
work, perhaps flare into riot, if they imagine one of their number
has suffered a wrong.

The principal of a school with four hundred Sicilian pupils observes
that on the playground they are at once more passionate and more
vindictive than other children. Elsewhere, once discipline has been
established, "the school will run itself"; but in this school the
teacher "has to sit on the lid all the time." Their restlessness
keeps the truant officer busy, and their darting, flickering
attention denies them concentration and the steady, telling stroke.
For all their apparent brightness, when at fourteen they quit
school, they are rarely beyond the third or fourth grade.

As grinding rusty iron reveals the bright metal, so American
competition brings to light the race stuff in poverty-crushed
immigrants. But not all this stuff is of value in a democracy like
ours. Only a people endowed with a steady attention, a slow-fuse
temper, and a persistent will can organize itself for success in
the international rivalries to come. So far as the American people
consents to incorporate with itself great numbers of wavering,
excitable, impulsive persons who cannot organize themselves, it must
in the end resign itself to lower efficiency, to less democracy, or
to both.

[Illustration:

  1866-70       8300
  1871-75      27100
  1876-80      28700
  1881-85     109500
  1886-90     197800
  1891-95     289200
  1896-1900   369300
  1901-05     959800
  1906-10    1186100

Immigration from Italy, 1866-1910]




CHAPTER VI

THE SLAVS


In the dim east of Europe, far from the vertical beams of
civilization, lies the melancholy Slavic world, with its 150,000,000
of human beings multiplying twice as fast and dying twice as fast
as the peoples of the West. Since the curtain of history rose, the
Slavs have been anvil rather than hammer. Subjugated by the Gauls in
the first century B. C., by the Germans early in the Christian era,
and by the Avars in the sixth century, they have played no master
rôle in history and their very name is a conqueror's insult. In the
temper of this race there appears to be something soft and yielding.
For all their courage, these peaceful agriculturists have shown much
less of the fighting, retaliating instinct than the Britons and the
Norsemen.

At a time when western Europe was sending forth armies to rescue the
Holy Sepulcher much of Slavland lay still in heathen darkness. Human
sacrifices and the practice of _suttee_ did not disappear until the
adoption of Christianity. Helmold, a priest of Lübeck, who in 1158
was sent to Christianize the Slavs, speaks of them as a "depraved
and perverse nation," and their country is to him "a land of
horror and a vast solitude." In 1108 the Archbishop of Magdeburg
writes in a pastoral letter, "These cruel people, the Slavs, have
risen against us."... "They have cut off the heads of Christians and
offered them as sacrifices."

[Illustration: Photograph by Hine

Slav Sisters]

[Illustration: Photograph by Hine

Slovak Girl]

Unlike the maritime peoples of the West, the Slavs had no easement
from the colonizing of the New World. When the era of machine
industry dawned, they were not able, as were the English, the
French, and the Germans, to get into the sunshine by catering to the
world's demand for cheap manufactured goods. Moreover, they have had
to bear the brunt of Oriental onslaught. The South Slavs--of Servia,
Bulgaria, Herzegovina, and Macedonia--fell under those Comanches of
Asia, the Turks, so that only within the last thirty-five years have
the spires and turrets of their submerged civilization reappeared
above the receding Ottoman flood.

While the Bohemians and the Moravians, thanks to a great
intellectual awakening, have come nearly abreast of the Germans,
the bulk of the Slavs remain on a much lower plane of culture.
In ignorance and illiteracy, in the prevalence of superstition
and priestcraft, in the harshness of church and state, in the
subservience of the common people to the upper classes, in the low
position of woman, in the subjection of the child to the parent, in
coarseness of manner and speech, and in low standards of cleanliness
and comfort, a large part of the Slavic world remains at the level
of our English forefathers in the days of Henry the Eighth.

According to mother-tongue, there were in this country in 1910,
941,000 Poles, 228,000 Bohemians and Moravians, 165,000 Slovaks
from the southern <DW72>s of the Carpathians, 123,000 Slovenes from
the head of the Adriatic, 78,000 Croatians and Dalmatians, 56,000
Russians, 40,000 Bulgarians, Servians, and Montenegrins, 30,000
Slavonians, 25,000 Ruthenians, to say nothing of 140,000 Lithuanians
and Letts, who insist that they are a race apart. All told, there
are 2,000,000 Slavs among us, and, if we heed the estimates of the
leaders of the Slav groups, we should reckon at least 3,000,000. No
doubt, between five and six per cent. of the whites in this country
are of Slavic blood.

Of the Slav arrivals since 1899 nearly three-fourths are males.
Among the immigrants from the Balkans, the men are from ten to
twenty times as numerous as the women. Thirty-two per cent. have
been illiterates, the proportion ranging from 1.7 per cent. among
the Bohemians to 53.4 per cent. among the Ruthenians. Excepting the
Bohemians, few of them have had any industrial experience or bring
any valuable skill. It is as if great numbers of the English of the
sixteenth century had suddenly appeared among us.


OCCUPATIONS OF THE SLAVIC IMMIGRANTS

When, about fifteen years ago, the great Slav invasion began,
the American frontier was remote, shrunken, and forbidding. The
newcomers were not in quest of cheap land, with independence, so
much as of paying jobs from which they might hoard "big money" and
return well off to their homes. They gravitated, therefore, to
the mining, metal-working, and packing centers, where there is a
demand for unlimited quantities of raw labor, provided always it
be cheap. So these sturdy peasant lads came to be Nibelungs, "sons
of the gloom," haunting our coal-pits, blast-furnaces, coke-ovens,
smelters, foundries, steel-mills, and metal refineries, doing rough,
coarse work under skilled men who, as one foreman put it to me,
"don't want them to _think_, but to _obey orders_."

What irony that these peasants, straight from ox-goad and furrow,
should come to constitute, so far as we can judge from official
figures, three-fifths of the force in sugar refining, two-fifths of
the force in meat-packing, three-eighths of the labor in tanneries
and in oil refineries, one-third of the coal-miners and of the
iron- and steel-workers, one-fourth of the workers in carpet-mills,
and one-fifth of the hands in the clothing trade! On the other hand,
they are but one-seventh of the labor force in the glass-factories
and in the cotton-mills, one-ninth of the employees in copper-mining
and smelting (who are largely Finns), one-twelfth of our railway
labor, and only a handful in the silk and woolen industries.

For these manful Slavs, no work is too toilsome and dangerous.
Their fatalistic acceptance of risk has much to do with the
excessive blood-cost of certain of our industries. They are not
"old clo'" men, junk-dealers, hucksters, peddlers, and snappers-up
of unconsidered trifles, as are some of the people among us. They
have no nose for the small, parasitic trades, but with a splendid
work courage they tackle the heavy, necessary tasks. Large of body,
hard-muscled, and inexpert in making his head save his heels,
the Slav inevitably becomes the unskilled laborer in the basic
industries.

Unlike the Teutons and Scandinavians of the eighties, whose chief
location was the country beyond Chicago, the later Slavs have been
drawn to Pennsylvania, in the hard-coal fields and the Pittsburgh
district, and thence they have spread to the rising mining and
metal-working centers throughout the country. So many are single
men that they form an extraordinarily mobile labor force, willing
to go anywhere for an extra two cents an hour. Although they do not
build homes, and hence are dependent upon such housing as they can
find, they do not stagnate in slums, save as the conditions of their
employment impose congestion.

Bohemians and Poles come here to stay, so it is they who furnish the
farmers. The Bohemian current began as far back as the fifties, and
in 1900 a quarter of all the Bohemian-Americans were on the land.
The Poles came later, and with less money, so that only one-tenth
were then in agriculture. The immigrants of the seventies sought
wild, cheap land, and therefore the Slav settlements are thickest in
the Northwest and the Southwest. One-third of all the Polish farmers
are in Wisconsin, while in Texas Bohemian cotton-growers are so
numerous that in some localities even the <DW64>s speak Bohemian!
Of late raw Poles, working up through farm labor and tenancy, are
coming to own "abandoned farms" in the Connecticut Valley. Crowded
with several other families in an old Yankee farm-house, the Pole is
raising, with the aid of his numerous progeny, incredible crops of
onions and tobacco. "In old Hadley," reports Professor Emily Balch
of Wellesley College, "all up and down the beautiful elm-shaded
street the old colonial mansions are occupied by Poles." In one year
these Poles, who were but one-fifth of the population, accounted for
two-thirds of the births.


EXCESSIVE ALCOHOLISM AMONG THE SLAVS

Coming from an Elizabethan world, the Slav is as frankly vinous
as Falstaff with his "cup o' sack." He is a Bacchus worshiper
unashamed, and our squeamishness about liquor strikes him as either
hypocrisy or prudery. He thinks, too, that without stimulant
he cannot stand up to the grueling work of mill and mine. A
steel-worker, when besought to give up drink, replied, "No beer,
no whisky, me no work." Hence an incredible amount of his wages
goes to line the till of the saloon-keeper. In a steel town of
30,000 population, $60,000 are left with the saloon-keepers the
Saturday and Sunday after pay-day. The Saturday brewery-wagon makes
the rounds, and on a pleasant Sunday one sees in the yard of each
boarding-house a knot of broad-shouldered, big-faced men about a keg
of liquid comfort.

It is at celebrations that the worst excesses show themselves. What
with caring for their large families and their boarders, the women
usually lose their attractiveness early, and therewith their power
to exercise a refining influence upon their men-folk. A wedding or
a christening-feast lasts an entire day, and toward the end men
beastly drunk bellow and fight in the presence of the terrified
women and children. During festivals, too, old feuds, rekindled
by drink, flare up in brutal and bloody rows. At such times one
realizes that the poet Kollár's famous phrase "the dove-blood of the
Slav" does not apply to the exhilarated.

Still, their heavy drinking is spasmodic, and they are said to
lose less time from work on account of intoxication than certain
other nationalities. Says a Jersey City doctor practising among the
Ruthenians, "They drink, but few die drunkards or hurt their health
with alcohol. If a man does get drunk he is likely to be violent. If
he strikes his wife she defends herself if she can, but she does not
complain, for she knows he has 'a right to hit her' and that makes a
great difference." In Slavic neighborhoods, American influence first
shows itself in the rise of a community sentiment against alcoholic
excess and in a growing refinement in festal customs.


CRIMES OF THE PRIMITIVE PASSIONS

For crime the Slav betrays no such bent as the South Italian.
Aside from petty thieving--noted in some cases--the complaints of
people near a Slav settlement center upon the affrays that follow
in the wake of convivial drinking. The Bohemians have about the
same criminal tendencies as the Germans. The other Slavs reveal
the propensities of a rude, undeveloped people of undisciplined
primitive passions. Animosity rather than cupidity is the motive of
crime. When the Slav seeks illicit gain he takes the direct path
of violence rather than the devious path of chicane; he commits
robbery or burglary rather than theft or fraud or extortion. From
crimes against chastity, and the loathsome knaveries that center
in the social evil, he is singularly free. Morally, the stock is
better than one would judge from the police records and from its
reputation. No doubt if the descendants of these immigrants have the
proper training and surrounding they will prove as orderly as the
old American stock.


SLAVIC BRUTALITY AND RECKLESS FECUNDITY

Among the South Slavs "every married man," says Vrčević, as
quoted by Professor W. I. Thomas, "strikes his wife black and blue
at least once a month, or spreads a box on the ear over her whole
face, or else people are likely to say that he is afraid of his
wife." Their popular proverbs corroborate this, as for example: "He
who does not beat his wife is no man." "Strike a wife and a snake on
the head." "One devil is afraid of the cross, the other (the wife)
of a stick." "The dog may howl, but the wife must hold her tongue."
In one wedding-song the bride begs her husband: "Strike your wife
only with good cause and when she has greatly vexed you." In another
folk-song the young wife sings: "What sort of husband are you to me?
You do not pull my hair, nor do you strike me!"

Although beating the wife with a wet rope is going out of practice,
the Galician peasant, says Von Hupka, "still regards her as a
thing belonging to him, which was made in the first place for his
service." No wonder the Slav mother averages eight children! No
wonder there is an appalling infant mortality, while a childbed
death is too often the fate of the forspent mother. Little cares
the stolid peasant. What is the woman there for? Nor is this view
strange in the New World. In Hungary the Slovak women "bear a child
a year--'always either bearing or nursing,' is the saying." But the
annual child arrives likewise in the Slovak families of New York.
The Slav wife in this country bears from two to two and a half
times as fast as the wife of American parentage. Her daughter born
under the Stars and Stripes is seven-eighths as prolific as her
barefoot immigrant mother. The average Slavic charity case involves
five persons, the German or Scandinavian case four persons, the
American case three and one-half persons. A drunken Pole said with
pride to the agent of a charitable society that was supporting his
family: "Just think what I've done for the State! I've given it ten
children!"

[Illustration: Courtesy of The Survey

Slav Woman and Italian Husband]

[Illustration: Photograph by Hine

Slovak Girls]

The Middle Ages are beginning to show among us. In twenty-one rural
counties of Minnesota the Polish women have borne, on an average,
seven children in the course of fourteen and a half years of
married life. The full tale, no doubt, will come to nine or ten.
Thanks to our child-pitying, child-saving civilization, the Polish
mother will keep her brood nearly as well as her American neighbor
with four or five. "The Irish for children," runs the proverb; and
yet one Irish-American wife out of thirteen is childless, and one
English-American wife out of twelve. But on the Minnesota farms only
one Polish-American wife out of fifty-eight is barren!

In a county where the Poles, although but a third of the population,
register 58 per cent. of the births, an old farmer said to me:
"The Yankees here are too lazy to have kids. The Poles have from
ten to fifteen in a family, and in a hundred years the people
here will all be Poles." A hundred years? Even fourteen years ago
Father Kruszka reckoned that there were in this country 700 such
Polish communities, averaging a hundred families each. So there
are hundreds of centers from which the Middle Ages spread. Farm by
farm, township by township, the displacement of the American goes
on--a quiet conquest, without spear or trumpet, a conquest made by
child-bearing women. The fathers forage, but it is the mothers who
have to face anguish, exhaustion, and even death in the campaign to
possess the land. Spending their women brutally, the Slavs advance;
pitying their women, the Americans retreat.

How can woman-worth go on rising as this country fills with people
who have the brood-mare idea of woman? Yet leaders in the cause of
womanhood are doing their best to hold the door open for the very
tribes who most despise and misuse their sex! On the other hand,
the new immigration may well find favor in the eyes of those who
look upon the bearing of ten children as woman's best lot, and are
complacent at seeing the stocks with low standards outbreed and
crowd into oblivion the stocks with high standards.


SLOW ASSIMILATION

Eastern Europe is full of half-drowned nationalities, which only of
late are regaining self-consciousness. Bohemians, Slovaks, Poles,
Lithuanians, Servians, and Bulgarians--each have had an "awakening,"
in which language revival and the study of national literature and
history have played a great part. The immigrants who come with
this quickened sense of nationality make it a point of honor not
to drift selfishly with the American current and so lose touch
with their struggling brethren in the old home. After refusing to
be Germanized, Russified, or Magyarized in the old country, the
patriotic Bohemian or Pole is bound to resist absorption here. It
was the Irish-Americans who got the leverage for freeing Ireland.
Now the Bohemians here are hoping to win home rule for Bohemia;
while the Polish-Americans expect to find on this side of the water
the fulcrum for the lever that shall free Poland. What, then, more
natural than to cling to their own speech and traditions in home and
church and parish school?

The vernacular press, of course, harps ever on the chord of "the
national speech," so that the second generation may not drift
away to the reading of American newspapers. The church, too,
which carries matters with a high hand among the Poles, holds the
immigrants away from Americanization. The good priests fear lest
some of their flock should turn away from religion, while the greedy
priests dread lest the flock should become restless under priestly
dictation.

Our million Poles outnumber all the rest of the Slavs in America,
and the Poles are very clannish. When they settle in groups there
is little association between them and their neighbors. "In the
communities visited," reports the Industrial Commission, "farmers
of German, Scandinavian, Irish, Bohemian, Belgian, Swiss, and
American origin were found living in juxtaposition to Poles. In
virtually every instance the Pole was considered one degree lower
than his neighbors." "Neither the Poles as a body nor the others
desire to fuse socially, and the Bohemians felt well above their
Slavic brethren." The farmers look down on the Poles as uncleanly,
intemperate, quarrelsome, ignorant, priest-ridden, and hard on
women and children. When a few Poles have come into a neighborhood,
the other farmers become restless, sell out, and move away. Soon
a parish is organized, church and parish school arise, the public
school decays, and Slavdom has a new outpost.

The core of the large settlement is likely to be a rancid bit
of the Old World. Clerical domination to a degree not tolerated
among other Roman Catholics, a stately church overlooking mean
farm-houses, numerous church holidays, a tiny public school, built
wholly out of State grant, with a sister in the garb of her order as
schoolmistress, a big parish school, using only Polish and teaching
chiefly the catechism, a high illiteracy and a dense ignorance
among lads born on American soil, crimes of violence rather than
crimes of cunning, horror of water applied inside or outside,
aversion to fresh air, barefoot women at work in the fields, with
wretched housekeeping as the natural result, saloons patronized
by both sexes, the priest frequently urging his flock to "have as
many children as God will give them," much loth motherhood, early
death from excessive child-bearing, large families brought up by
the third, fourth, or fifth wife, harsh discipline of children,
political apathy, a controlled vote, and an open contempt for
Americans and their principles.

Little better off are the Slavs clustered by themselves in some
"mining-patch" in the coal-fields or in the industrial quarter of
a metal town. The general population does not associate with them,
and they have their own church, school, customs, and festivals. The
men pick up a little English, the women none at all. It is really
the children that are the battle-ground of old and new. Let them
mingle freely with Young America, and no pressure from their parents
can make them remain different from their playmates. They dread the
nickname of "Hun," "Hunkie," or "Bohunk" as if it were poison, and
nothing will induce them to use their home tongue or take part in
the organized life of their nationality.

In the big rural settlement, however, the children can be kept from
outsiders, and the parents, who want them to settle on the farm,
usually have their way. A few of the more restless dive off the
island into circumambient America. For a little time the second
generation appears progressive; it dresses flashily and shows itself
"sporty." But after it marries it loses spirit, settles down, and
obeys priest and parent. Whether the system can hold the third
generation remains to be seen.

Obviously, the bird-of-passage Slovak or Croat who has left a
wife at home, and who roughs it with his compatriots in a "stag"
boarding-house in a dreary "black country," is a poor subject for
assimilation. His life is bounded by the "boarding boss," the
saloon-keeper, the private banker, and the priest--all of them
of his own folk. Aside from the foreman's cursing, American life
reaches him only through the eye, and then only the worst side of
it. But for the good pay, he would hate his life here; and he goes
back home with little idea of America save that it is a land of big
chances to make money.


SMALL ABILITY OF IMMIGRANT SLAVS

Without calling in question the worth of the Slavic race, one may
note that the immigrant Slavs have small reputation for capacity.
Many observers, after allowing for their illiteracy and lack of
opportunity, still insist that they have little to contribute to our
people. "These people haven't any natural ability to transmit," said
a large employer of Slavs. "You may grind and polish dull minds all
you want to in the public schools, but you never will get a keen
edge on them because the steel is poor." "They aren't up to the
American grade," insisted the manager of a steel-works. "We have
a 'suggestion box,' and we reward valuable suggestions from our
men, but precious few ever come from immigrant labor." The labor
agent of a great implement-works rates the immigrant 75 in ability
as compared with the American. A Bohemian leader puts his people
above the Americans in music and the fine arts, but concedes the
superiority of the Americans in constructive imagination, organizing
ability, and tenacity of purpose. "The Czechs," he says, "are
strong in resistance but are not aggressive."

A steel-town superintendent of schools finds the bulk of the
children of the Slavs "rather sluggish intellectually." They do well
in the lower grades, where memory counts most; but in the higher
grades, where association is called for, they fall behind. Of 23,000
pupils of non-English-speaking fathers, 43.4 per cent. were found
to be behind their grade; the percentage of retardation for the
children of Bohemian fathers was only 35.6 per cent.; but for Poles,
the retardation was 58.1 per cent., and for Slovaks 54.5 per cent.
While this showing is poor, there are good school men who stoutly
maintain that it is still too soon to judge what the Slav-American
can do.


THE ALARMING PROSPECT OF SLAVIC IMMIGRATION

An outflow of political exiles comes to an end when there is a turn
of the political wheel; but a stream squeezed out by population
pressure may flow on forever. So long as the birth-rate remains
high, the mother-country is not depleted by the hemorrhage. "What
has been the effect of emigration to America upon conditions in
Bohemia?" I asked of an intelligent Czech. "Bohemia," he replied,
with emphasis, "is just as crowded to-day; the struggle is just as
hard as if never a Bohemian had left for America." "Will Polish
emigration remain large?" I asked a leader of the Polish-Americans.
"Yes," he replied, "it will continue for a long time. The Poles
multiply at an extreme rate, and there is no room for them to expand
in Poland."

Still, these minor currents may be lost in the flood that is likely
to roll in upon us, once the great central Slavic mass of 80,000,000
"true Russians" is tapped. "This," observes the Immigration
Commission, "affords a practically unlimited source of immigration,
and one which may reasonably be expected to contribute largely to
the movement from Europe to the United States in the future." "The
economic conditions which in large part impel the emigration of
these races (Russian Hebrews, Poles, Lithuanians and Finns) prevail
also among true Russians, and already they are beginning to seek
relief through emigration."

So the tide from Slavland may swell, and the superfecund Slavs
may push to the wall the Anglo-Americans, the Irish-Americans,
the Welsh-Americans, the German-Americans, and the rest, until
the invasion of our labor market by hordes of still cheaper West
Asiatics shall cause the Slav, too, to lose interest in America,
even as the Briton, the Hibernian, the Teuton, and the Scandinavian
have lost interest in America.

[Illustration: Photograph by Hine

Russian Jews, Ellis Island]

[Illustration: Courtesy of The Survey

Hindoo Immigrants]




CHAPTER VII

THE EAST EUROPEAN HEBREWS


In his defense of Flaccus, a Roman governor who had "squeezed" his
Jewish subjects, Cicero lowers his voice when he comes to speak
of the Jews, for, as he explains to the judges, there are persons
who might excite against him this numerous, clannish and powerful
element. With much greater reason might an American lower his voice
to-day in discussing two million Hebrew immigrants united by a
strong race consciousness and already ably represented at every
level of wealth, power, and influence in the United States.

At the time of the Revolution there were perhaps 700 Jewish families
in the colonies. In 1826 the number of Jews in the United States
was estimated at 6000; in 1840, at 15,000; in 1848, at 50,000. The
immigration from Germany brought great numbers, and at the outbreak
of the Civil War there were probably 150,000 Jews in this country.
In 1888, after the first wave from Russia, they were estimated at
400,000. Since the beginning of 1899, one and one-third millions of
Hebrews have settled in this country.

Easily one-fifth of the Hebrews in the world are with us, and the
freshet shows no signs of subsidence. America is coming to be
hailed as the "promised land," and Zionist dreams are yielding
to the conviction that it will be much easier for the keen-witted
Russian Jews to prosper here as a free component in a nation of a
hundred millions than to grub a living out of the baked hillsides
of Palestine. With Mr. Zangwill they exult that: "America has ample
room for all the six millions of the Pale; any one of her fifty
states could absorb them. And next to being in a country of their
own, there could be no better fate for them than to be together
in a land of civil and religious liberty, of whose Constitution
Christianity forms no part and where their collective votes would
practically guarantee them against future persecution."

Hence the endeavor of the Jews to control the immigration policy
of the United States. Although theirs is but a seventh of our net
immigration, they led the fight on the Immigration Commission's
bill. The power of the million Jews in the metropolis lined up the
Congressional delegation from New York in solid opposition to the
literacy test. The systematic campaign in newspapers and magazines
to break down all arguments for restriction and to calm nativist
fears is waged by and for one race. Hebrew money is behind the
National Liberal Immigration League and its numerous publications.
From the paper before the commercial body or the scientific
association to the heavy treatise produced with the aid of the
Baron de Hirsch Fund, the literature that proves the blessings of
immigration to all classes in America emanates from subtle Hebrew
brains. In order to admit their brethren from the Pale the brightest
of the Semites are keeping our doors open to the dullest of the
Aryans!

Migrating as families the Hebrews from eastern Europe are pretty
evenly divided between the sexes. Their illiteracy is 26 per cent.,
about the average. Artisans and professional men are rather numerous
among them. They come from cities and settle in cities--half of
them in New York. Centuries of enforced Ghetto life seem to have
bred in them a herding instinct. No other physiques can so well
withstand the toxins of urban congestion. Save the Italians, more
Jews will crowd upon a given space than any other nationality. As
they prosper they do not proportionately enlarge their quarters.
Of Boston tenement-house Jews Dr. Bushee testifies: "Their inborn
love of money-making leads them to crowd into the smallest quarters.
Families having very respectable bank accounts have been known to
occupy cellar rooms where damp and cold streaked the walls." "There
are actually streets in the West End where, while Jews are moving
in, <DW64> housewives are gathering up their skirts and seeking a
more spotless environment."

The first stream of Russo-Hebrew immigrants started flowing in
1882 in consequence of the reactionary policy of Alexander III.
It contained many students and members of scholarly families, who
stimulated intellectual activity among their fellows here and were
leaders in radical thought. These idealists established newspapers
in the Jewish-German Jargon and thus made Yiddish (_Jüdisch_) a
literary language. The second stream reached us after 1890 and
brought immigrants who were not steeped in modern ideas but held to
Talmudic traditions and the learning of the rabbis. The more recent
flow taps lower social strata and is prompted by economic motives.
These later arrivals lack both the idealism of the first stream and
the religious culture of the second.

Besides the Russian Jews we are receiving large numbers from
Galicia, Hungary, and Roumania. The last are said to be of a high
type, whereas the Galician Jews are the lowest. It is these whom
Joseph Pennell, the illustrator, found to be "people who, despite
their poverty, never work with their hands; whose town ... is but a
hideous nightmare of dirt, disease and poverty" and its misery and
ugliness "the outcome of their own habits and way of life and not,
as is usually supposed, forced upon them by Christian persecutors."


OCCUPATIONS

The Hebrew immigrants rarely lay hand to basic production. In
tilling the soil, in food growing, in extracting minerals, in
building, construction and transportation they have little part.
Sometimes they direct these operations, often they finance them, but
even in direst poverty they contrive to avoid hard muscular labor.
Under pressure the Jew takes to the pack as the Italian to the pick.

In the '80's numerous rural colonies of Hebrews were planted,
but, despite much help from outside, all except the colonies near
Vineland, New Jersey, utterly failed. In New York and New England
there are more than a thousand Hebrew farmers, but most of them
speculate in real estate, keep summer boarders, or depend on some
side enterprise--peddling, cattle trading or junk buying--for a
material part of their income. The Hebrew farmers, said to number
in all 6000, maintain a federation and are provided with a farmers'
journal. New colonies are launched at brief intervals, and Jewish
city boys are being trained for country life. Still, not over one
Hebrew family in a hundred is on the land and the rural trend is but
a trickle compared with the huge inflow.

Perhaps two-fifths of the Hebrew immigrants gain their living
from garment-making. Naturally the greater part of the clothing
and dry goods trade, the country over, is in their hands. They
make eighty-five per cent. of the cigars and most of the domestic
cigarettes. They purchase all but an insignificant part of the leaf
tobacco from the farmers and sell it to the manufacturers. They are
prominent in the retailing of spirits, and the Jewish distiller is
almost as typical as the German brewer.

None can beat the Jew at a bargain, for through all the intricacies
of commerce he can scent his profit. The peddler, junk dealer, or
pawn broker is on the first rung of the ladder. The more capable
rise in a few years to be theatrical managers, bankers or heads of
department stores. Moreover great numbers are clerks and salesmen
and thousands are municipal and building contractors. Many of the
second generation enter the civil service and the professions.
Already in several of the largest municipalities and in the Federal
bureaus a large proportion of the positions are held by keen-witted
Jews. Twenty years ago under the spoils system the Irish held
most of the city jobs in New York. Now under the test system the
Jews are driving them out. Among the school teachers of the city
Jewesses outnumber the women of any other nationality. Owing to
their aversion to "blind-alley" occupations Jewish girls shun
housework and crowd into the factories, while those who can get
training become stenographers, bookkeepers, accountants and private
secretaries. One-thirteenth of the students in our seventy-seven
leading universities and colleges are of Hebrew parentage. The young
Jews take eagerly to medicine and it is said that from seven hundred
to nine hundred of the physicians in New York are of their race.
More noticeable is the influx into dentistry and especially into
pharmacy. Their trend into the legal profession has been pronounced,
and of late there is a movement of Jewish students into engineering,
agriculture and forestry.


MORALS

The Jewish immigrants cherish a pure, close-knit family life and the
position of the woman in the home is one of dignity. More than any
other immigrants they are ready to assume the support of distant
needy relatives. They care for their own poor, and the spirit of
coöperation among them is very noticeable. Their temper is sensitive
and humane; very rarely is a Jew charged with any form of brutality.
There is among them a fine _élite_ which responds to the appeal of
the ideal and is found in every kind of ameliorative work.

Nevertheless, fair-minded observers agree that certain bad qualities
crop out all too often among these eastern Europeans. A school
principal remarks that his Jewish pupils are more importunate to
get a mark changed than his other pupils. A settlement warden who
during the summer entertains hundreds of nursing slum mothers at
a country "home" says: "The Jewish mothers are always asking for
_something extra_ over the regular kit we provide each guest for
her stay." "The last thing the son of Jacob wants," observes an
eminent sociologist, "is a square deal." A veteran New York social
worker cannot forgive the Ghetto its littering and defiling of the
parks. "Look at Tompkins Square," he exclaimed hotly, "and compare
it with what it was twenty-five years ago amid a German population!"
As for the caretakers of the parks their comment on this matter is
unprintable. Genial settlement residents, who never tire of praising
Italian or Greek, testify that no other immigrants are so noisy,
pushing and disdainful of the rights of others as the Hebrews. That
the worst exploiters of these immigrants are sweaters, landlords,
employers and "white slavers" of their own race no one gainsays.

The authorities complain that the East European Hebrews feel no
reverence for law as such and are willing to break any ordinance
they find in their way. The fact that pleasure-loving Jewish
business men spare Jewesses but pursue Gentile girls excites bitter
comment. The insurance companies scan a Jewish fire risk more
closely than any other. Credit men say the Jewish merchant is often
"slippery" and will "fail" in order to get rid of his debts. For
lying the immigrant has a very bad reputation. In the North End
of Boston "the readiness of the Jews to commit perjury has passed
into a proverb." Conscientious immigration officials become very
sore over the incessant fire of false accusations to which they are
subjected by the Jewish press and societies. United States senators
complain that during the close of the struggle over the immigration
bill they were overwhelmed with a torrent of crooked statistics and
misrepresentations by the Hebrews fighting the literacy test.

Graver yet is the charge that these East European immigrants
lower standards wherever they enter. In the boot and shoe trade
some Hebrew jobbers who, after sending in an order to the
manufacturer, find the market taking an unexpected downward turn,
will reject a consignment on some pretext in order to evade a loss.
Says Dr. Bushee: "The shame of a variety of underhanded methods
in trade not easily punishable by law must be laid at the door of
a certain type of Jew." It is charged that for personal gain the
Jewish dealer wilfully disregards the customs of the trade and
thereby throws trade ethics into confusion. Physicians and lawyers
complain that their Jewish colleagues tend to break down the ethics
of their professions. It is certain that Jews have commercialized
the social evil, commercialized the theatre, and done much to
commercialize the newspaper.

[Illustration: Photograph by Hine

Slovak Woman and Jewish Man, Ellis Island]

[Illustration: Courtesy of The Survey

Jewish Girl in a Chicago Sweat-Shop]

The Jewish leaders admit much truth in the impeachment. One accounts
for the bad reputation of his race in the legal profession by
pointing out that they entered the tricky branches of it, viz.,
commercial law and criminal law. Says a high minded lawyer:
"If the average American entered law as we have to, without
money, connections or adequate professional education, he would
be a shyster too." Another observes that the sharp practice
of the Russo-Jewish lawyer belongs to the earlier part of his
career when he must succeed or starve. As he prospers his sense
of responsibility grows. For example, some years ago the Bar
Association of New York opposed the promotion of a certain Hebrew
lawyer to the bench on the ground of his unprofessional practices.
But this same lawyer made one of the best judges the city ever had,
and when he retired he was banqueted by the Association.

The truth seems to be that the lower class of Jews of eastern
Europe reach here moral <DW36>s, their souls warped and dwarfed
by iron circumstance. The experience of Russian repression has
made them haters of government and corrupters of the police. Life
amid a bigoted and hostile population has left them aloof and
thick-skinned. A tribal spirit intensified by social isolation
prompts them to rush to the rescue of the caught rascal of their
own race. Pent within the Talmud and the Pale of Settlement,
their interests have become few, and many of them have developed
a monstrous and repulsive love of gain. When now, they use their
Old-World shove and wile and lie in a society like ours, as
unprotected as a snail out of its shell, they rapidly push up into a
position of prosperous parasitism, leaving scorn and curses in their
wake.

Gradually, however, it dawns upon this twisted soul that here there
is no need to be weazel or hedgehog. He finds himself in a new game,
the rules of which are made by _all_ the players. He himself is a
part of the state that is weakened by his law-breaking, a member of
the profession that is degraded by his sharp practices. So smirk
and cringe and trick presently fall away from him, and he stands
erect. This is why, in the same profession at the same time, those
most active in breaking down standards are Jews and those most
active in raising standards are Jews--of an earlier coming or a
later generation. "On the average," says a Jewish leader, "only the
third generation feels perfectly at home in American society." This
explains the frequent statement that the Jews are "the limit"--among
the worst of the worst and among the best of the best.


CRIME

The Hebrew immigrants usually commit their crimes for gain; and
among gainful crimes they lean to gambling, larceny, and the
receiving of stolen goods rather than to the more daring crimes of
robbery and burglary. The fewness of the Hebrews in prison has been
used to spread the impression that they are uncommonly law-abiding.
The fact is it is harder to catch and convict criminals of cunning
than criminals of violence. The chief of police of any large city
will bear emphatic testimony as to the trouble Hebrew law-breakers
cause him. Most alarming is the great increase of criminality among
Jewish young men and the growth of prostitution among Jewish girls.
Says a Jewish ex-assistant attorney-general of the United States in
an address before the B'nai B'rith: "Suddenly we find appearing in
the life of the large cities the scarlet woman of Jewish birth."
"In the women's night court of New York City and on gilded Broadway
the majority of street walkers bear Jewish names." "This sudden
break in Jewish morality was not natural. It was a product of cold,
calculating, mercenary methods, devised and handled by men of Jewish
birth." Says the president of the Conference of American Rabbis:
"The Jewish world has been stirred from center to circumference by
the recent disclosures of the part Jews have played in the pursuance
of the white slave traffic." On May 14, 1911, a Yiddish paper in New
York said, editorially:

"It is almost impossible to comprehend the indifference with which
the large New York Jewish population hears and reads, day after
day, about the thefts and murders that are perpetrated every day by
Jewish gangs--real bands of robbers--and no one raises a voice of
protest, and no demand is made for the protection of the reputation
of the Jews of America and for the life and property of the Jewish
citizens."

"A few years ago when Commissioner Bingham came out with a statement
about Jewish thieves, the Jews raised a cry of protest that
reached the heavens. The main cry was that Bingham exaggerated and
overestimated the number of Jewish criminals. But when we hear of
the murders, hold-ups and burglaries committed in the Jewish section
by Jewish criminals, we must, with heartache, justify Mr. Bingham."

Two weeks later the same paper said: "How much more will Jewish
hearts bleed when the English press comes out with descriptions of
gambling houses packed with Jewish gamblers, of the blind cigar
stores where Jewish thieves and murderers are reared, of the gangs
that work systematically and fasten like vampires upon the peaceable
Jewish population, and of all the other nests of theft, robbery,
murder, and lawlessness that have multiplied in our midst."

This startling growth reflects the moral crisis through which many
immigrants are passing. Enveloped in the husks of medievalism, the
religion of many a Jew perishes in the American environment. The
immigrant who loses his religion is worse than the religionless
American because his early standards are dropped along with his
faith. With his clear brain sharpened in the American school,
the egoistic, conscienceless young Jew constitutes a menace. As
a Jewish labor leader said to me, "the non-morality of the young
Jewish business men is fearful. Socialism inspires an ethics in the
heart of the Jewish workingman, but there are many without either
the old religion or the new. I am aghast at the consciencelessness
of the _Luft-proletariat_ without feeling for place, community or
nationality."


RACE TRAITS

If the Hebrews are a race certainly one of their traits is
_intellectuality_. In Boston the milk station nurse gets far more
result from her explanations to Jewish mothers than from her talks
to Irish or Italian mothers. The Jewish parent, however grasping,
rarely exploits his children, for he appreciates how schooling will
add to their earning capacity. The young Jews have the foresight
to avoid "blind alley" occupations. Between the years of fourteen
and seventeen the Irish and Italian boys earn more than the Jewish
lads; but after eighteen the Jewish boys will be earning more, for
they have selected occupations in which you can work up. The Jew
is the easiest man to sell life insurance to, for he catches the
idea sooner than any other immigrant. As philanthropist he is the
first to appreciate scientific charity. As voter he is the first
to repudiate the political leader and rise to a broad outlook. As
exploited worker he is the first to find his way to a theory of
his hard lot, viz., capitalism. As employer he is quick to respond
to the idea of "welfare work." The Jewish patrons of the libraries
welcome guidance in their reading and they want always the best; in
fiction, Dickens, Tolstoi, Zola; in philosophy, Darwin, Spencer,
Haeckel. No other readers are so ready to tackle the heavy-weights
in economics and sociology.

From many school principals comes the observation that their
Jewish pupils are either very bright or distinctly dull. Among
the Russo-Jewish children many fall behind but some distinguish
themselves in their studies. The proportion of backward pupils
is about the average for school children of non-English-speaking
parentage; but the brilliant pupils indicate the presence in Hebrew
immigration of a gifted element which scarcely shows itself in other
streams of immigration. Teachers report that their Jewish pupils
"seem to have hungry minds." They "grasp information as they do
everything else, recognizing it as the requisite for success."
Says a principal: "Their progress in studies is simply another
manifestation of the acquisitiveness of the race." Another thinks
their school successes are won more by intense application than by
natural superiority, and judges his Irish pupils would do still
better if only they would work as many hours.

The Jewish gift for mathematics and chess is well known. They
have great imagination, but it is the "combinative" imagination
rather than the free poetic fancy of the Celt. They analyze out the
factors of a process and mentally put them together in new ways.
Their talent for anticipating the course of the market, making
fresh combinations in business, diagnosing diseases, and suggesting
scientific hypotheses is not questioned. On the other hand, an
eminent savant thinks the best Jewish minds are not strong in
generalization and deems them clever, acute and industrious rather
than able in the highest sense. On the whole, the Russo-Jewish
immigration is richer in gray matter than any other recent stream,
and it may be richer than any large inflow since the colonial era.

Perhaps _abstractness_ is another trait of the Jewish mind. To the
Hebrew things present themselves not softened by an atmosphere of
sentiment, but with the sharp outlines of that desert landscape
in which his ancestors wandered. As farmer he is slovenly and
does not root in the soil like the German. As poet he shows little
feeling for nature. Unlike the German artisan who becomes fond of
what he creates, the Jew does not love the concrete for its own
sake. What he cares for is the _value_ in it. Hence he is rarely
a good artisan, and perhaps the reason why he makes his craft a
mere stepping-stone to business is that he does not relish his
work. The Jew shines in literature, music and acting--the arts
of expression--but not often is he an artist in the manipulation
of materials. In theology, law and diplomacy--which involve the
abstract--the Jewish mind has distinguished itself more than in
technology or the study of nature.

The Jew has _little feeling for the particular_. He cares little
for pets. He loves man rather than men, and from Isaiah to Karl
Marx he holds the record in projects of social amelioration. The
Jew loves without romance and fights without hatred. He is loyal to
his purposes rather than to persons. He finds general principles
for whatever he wants to do. As circumstances change he will make
up with his worst enemy or part company with his closest ally.
Hence his wonderful adaptability. Flexible and rational the Jewish
mind cannot be bound by conventions. The good will of a Southern
gentleman takes set forms such as courtesy and attentions, while
the kindly Jew is ready with any form of help that may be needed.
So the South looked askance at the Jews as "no gentlemen." Nor
have the Irish with their strong personal loyalty or hostility
liked the Jews. On the other hand the Yankees have for the Jews a
cousinly feeling. Puritanism was a kind of Hebraism and throve most
in the parts of England where, centuries before, the Jews had been
thickest. With his rationalism, his shrewdness, his inquisitiveness
and acquisitiveness, the Yankee can meet the Jew on his own ground.

[Illustration: Jewish Runner Soliciting Immigrants for the Steamship
Company]

Like all races that survive the sepsis of civilization, the Hebrews
show great _tenacity of purpose_. Their constancy has worn out their
persecutors and won them the epithet of "stiff-necked." In their
religious ideas our Jewish immigrants are so stubborn that the
Protestant churches despair of making proselytes among them. The
sky-rocket careers leading from the peddler's pack to the banker's
desk or the professor's chair testify to rare singleness of purpose.
Whatever his goal--money, scholarship, or recognition--the true
Israelite never loses sight of it, cannot be distracted, presses
steadily on, and in the end masters circumstance instead of being
dominated by it. As strikers the Jewish wage earners will starve
rather than yield. The Jewish reader in the libraries sticks
indomitably to the course of reading he has entered on. No other
policy holder is so reliable as the Jew in keeping up his premiums.
The Jewish canvasser, bill collector, insurance solicitor, or
commercial traveler takes no rebuff, returns brazenly again and
again, and will risk being kicked down stairs rather than lose his
man. During the Civil War General Grant wrote to the war department
regarding the Jewish cotton traders who pressed into the South with
the northern armies: "I have instructed the commanding officer to
refuse all permits to Jews to come South, and I have frequently
had them expelled from the department, but they come in with their
carpet sacks in spite of all that can be done to prevent it."
Charity agents say that although their Hebrew cases are few, they
cost them more than other cases in the end because of the unblushing
persistence of the applicant. Some chiefs of police will not
tolerate the Hebrew prostitute in their city because they find it
impossible to subject her to any regulations.


THE RACE LINE

In New York the line is drawn against the Jews in hotels, resorts,
clubs, and private schools, and constantly this line hardens and
extends. They cry "Bigotry" but bigotry has little or nothing to
do with it. What is disliked in the Jews is not their religion
but certain ways and manners. Moreover, the Gentile resents being
obliged to engage in a humiliating and undignified scramble in order
to keep his trade or his clients against the Jewish invader. The
line is not yet rigid, for the genial editor of _Vorwaerts_, Mr.
Abram Cahan, tells me that he and his literary brethren from the
Pale have never encountered Anti-Semitism in the Americans they
meet. Not the socialist Jews but the vulgar upstart parvenus are
made to feel the discrimination.

This cruel prejudice--for all lump condemnations are cruel--is no
importation, no hang-over from the past. It appears to spring out
of contemporary experience and is invading circle after circle of
broad-minded. People who give their lives to befriending immigrants
shake their heads over the Galician Hebrews. It is astonishing how
much of the sympathy that twenty years ago went out to the fugitives
from Russian massacres has turned sour. Through fear of retaliation
little criticism gets into print; in the open the Philo-semites
have it all their way. The situation is: Honey above, gall beneath.
If the Czar, by keeping up the pressure which has already rid him
of two million undesired subjects, should succeed in driving the
bulk of his six million Jews to the United States, we shall see
the rise of a Jewish question here, perhaps riots and anti-Jewish
legislation. No doubt thirty or forty thousand Hebrews from eastern
Europe might be absorbed by this country each year without any
marked growth of race prejudice; but when they come in two or three
or even four times as fast, the lump outgrows the leaven, and there
will be trouble.

America is probably the strongest solvent Jewish separatism has
ever encountered. It is not only that here the Jew finds himself a
free man and a citizen. That has occurred before, without causing
the Jew to merge into the general population. It is that here more
than anywhere else in the world _the future is expected to be in
all respects better than the past_. No civilized people ever so
belittled the past in the face of the future as we do. This is
why tradition withers and dies in our air; and the dogma that the
Jews are a "peculiar people" and must shun intermarriage with the
Gentiles is only a tradition. The Jewish dietary laws are rapidly
going. In New York only one-fourth of the two hundred thousand
Jewish workmen keep their Sabbath and only one-fifth of the Jews
belong to the synagogue. The neglect of the synagogue is as marked
as the falling away of non-Jews from the church. Mixed marriages,
although by no means numerous in the centers, are on the increase,
and in 1909 the Central Conference of Jewish Rabbis resolved that
such marriages "are contrary to the tradition of the Jewish religion
and should therefore be discouraged by the American Rabbinate."
Certainly every mixed marriage is, as one rabbi puts it, "a nail in
the coffin of Judaism," and free mixing would in time end the Jews
as a distinct ethnic strain.

The "hard shell" leaders are urging the Jews in America to cherish
their distinctive traditions and to refrain from mingling their
blood with Gentiles. But the liberal and radical leaders insist that
in this new, ultra-modern environment nothing is gained by holding
the Jews within the wall of Orthodox Judaism. As a prominent Hebrew
labor leader said to me: "By blending with the American the Jew
will gain in physique, and this with its attendant participation in
normal labor, sports, athletics, outdoor life, and the like, will
lessen the hyper-sensibility and the sensuality of the Jew and make
him less vain, unscrupulous and pleasure-loving."

It is too soon yet to foretell whether or not this vast and growing
body of Jews from eastern Europe is to melt and disappear in the
American population just as numbers of Portuguese, Dutch, English,
and French Jews in our early days became blent with the rest of
the people. In any case the immigrant Jews are being assimilated
outwardly. The long coat, side curls, beard and fringes, the
"Wandering Jew" figure, the furtive manner, the stoop, the hunted
look, and the martyr air disappear as if by magic after a brief
taste of American life. It would seem as if the experience of Russia
and America in assimilating the Jews is happily illustrated by the
old story of the rivalry of the wind and the sun in trying to strip
the traveler of his cloak.




CHAPTER VIII

THE LESSER IMMIGRANT GROUPS


The immigration question is a live wire and whoever handles it may
look for tingling surprises. One is a bit startled on realizing that
through the "Bravas" from the Cape Verde Islands we are getting a
new dash of black from the Senegambian tar-brush. How few are aware
that a third of Sicily, from which so many immigrants come, is
chiefly Saracen in stock, so that the heredity of the Bedouin tribes
of Mohamet's time is to be blent with the heredity of our pioneering
breed! Who reflects that, with Chinese and Japanese, Finns and
Magyars, Bulgars and Turks, about a half a million more or less
Mongolian in blood have cast in their lot with us and will leave
their race stamp upon the American people of the future?


THE FINNS

Our 130,000 immigrants from Finland should be counted to the
Finno-Tartar branch of the Mongolian race, although since the dawn
of history the western Finns have intermingled with the Swedes until
their blondness and cast of countenance bespeak the North European.
Nevertheless, here and there among the Finns one notices that
inward and downward slant of the eyes which proclaims the Asiatic.

Ever since the heavy paw of the Russian bear descended on Finland,
these people have been seeping into the United States. They come for
liberty's sake, bring their families and expect to remain. Lovers
of wood and water, they keep to the North and the Northwest and are
willing to tackle the roughest land in order to become independent.
As farmers they are thrifty but, if left to themselves, not
particularly skillful or progressive. Among them survive Old-World
ways, such as reaping by handfuls with a sickle and hauling hay
from the field on a sleigh. With a sharp ax in his hand the Finn
turns artist and will hew out a log house so beautiful as to put an
American pioneer to the blush. One of the first things he builds is
an air-tight bath-house in which he may steam himself by dashing
water on hot stones.

Practically all these immigrants are literate and they are eager
patrons of night schools. In acquiring English they are rather
slow. Their native ability is good, but is not considered to be
equal to that of the Swedes. They are quiet and law-abiding, but
litigious. With his grim intensity of character the Finn cannot bear
to compromise his wrongs, but insists on all he thinks is due him.
It is needless to add that a man with so much iron in his blood is
honest.

Like the drunken Magyar or Lithuanian the "loaded" Finn is a
terrible fellow. Liquor seems to let loose in him fell and
destructive impulses which had been held in the leash by moral
ideas. The immigrants realize their danger and the total abstinence
movement is very strong amongst them. A rival current is Socialism
for, strange to say, thousands of Finns, since coming to this
country, have utterly lost faith in the existing social order. The
mining company praises the "temperance" Finns but makes haste to
get rid of the Socialists, although they are earnest people of a
peaceable temper.

Such movements reveal a thinking mood. Thanks to the long struggle
with Russia, the Finnish mind is awake and open to ideas. Our Finns
have a real thirst for education and, besides supporting the best
of public schools, they maintain near Duluth a college of their own
of 1,200 students. In all their discussions the women take an equal
share with the men and, when the Northwest adopts equal suffrage,
the wives of the Finns will be among the first to vote. The Finns
are prompt to acquire citizenship and they do not abuse the ballot.
They will not vote for a fellow countryman unless he is the fittest
candidate for the office.

Their civic attitude is revealed by an incident that occurred at the
outbreak of the Spanish-American war. A community of agricultural
Finns near Carlton, Minnesota, who had settled there in the
eighties, came together after the call for volunteers and considered
what they ought to do. After deliberation they concluded that in
token of their gratitude for their good fortune under the stars
and stripes they ought to send one of their number to the war. So
they picked out as their representative a stalwart, comely farm lad
of twenty-three and he served through the Cuban campaign as Finnish
champion of American institutions!

[Illustration: Magyar]

[Illustration: Roumanian]

[Illustration: Croatian]


THE MAGYARS

In the school of Western civilization the Finns and the Magyars
sit nearer the front than any other people of Mongol speech and
blood. In progressiveness the quarter of a million Magyars in our
midst are as American as any immigrants we receive. A thousand
years ago the Magyars, invading from Asia, conquered the Slavs in
Hungary and settled down as a dominant race. Although a minority in
the land, they have remained masters and rulers. Hence the Magyar
immigrant, however poverty-pinched, feels the constant prick of
the spur of race pride. His sense of honor is high. He will not
seek charity unless he really needs it. In a Magyar quarter squalor
and degeneration are not to be seen. The grass and flowers about
the cottages, the clean yard and the clean children proclaim the
presence of a race that cannot bear to be looked down on.

While the Magyars have been political and military leaders in
Hungary, the masses are familiar with the struggle for existence.
They are exploited in many ways by the Jews, who in Hungary have
been treated more liberally than anywhere else in Europe. It is not
surprising, then, that few immigrants land here with so little
money as the Magyars. Lacking the means to acquire land, they are
little known in agriculture. They go straight into the industries
and four-fifths of them are to be found in the workplaces of
Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio and New Jersey. They constitute a
floating labor supply shifting constantly back and forth between
Fiume and New York. In recent years four Magyars have departed for
every five that arrived.

Their illiteracy is 11.4 per cent., a better showing than is made by
any immigrants from eastern or southern Europe, save their cousins
the Finns. They bring more industrial skill than the average Slav
and their earning power is greater than that of most of the Slavic
nationalities. They are loth to remain renters and in their endeavor
to acquire a home they will assume burdens heavier than they can
carry. Their race pride plays into the hands of the hurry-up
American bosses with the result that, more than other immigrants,
the Magyars injure themselves by overwork.

In the Magyar stream the men are nearly three times as numerous as
the women and two out of five of the men have left wives in the old
country. This means boarding-house life, shocking congestion and
a rich harvest for saloon and bawdy house. The Pittsburgh Magyar
who earns $1.80 a day will spend ten cents of it for lodging,
forty cents for food, and thirty cents for beer. The Magyars are a
wine-drinking people and the immigrants come from the farms and know
nothing of the corrosion of cities. Being high-spirited, however,
they want to become American quickly, with the result that often
they acquire our vices before they acquire our virtues. In the mill
towns they learn to guzzle beer, carouse and leave their earnings
with the caterers to appetite.

Their crime record is bad. No alien is more dreaded by the police
than a vengeful or drink-maddened Magyar. The proportion of alien
Magyar prisoners who have been committed for murder is 35.6 per
cent., higher than of any other nationality save the Russians. Their
hot-headed and quarrelsome disposition causes personal violence to
bulk very large in their crime. In offenses against chastity their
showing is bad, but their bent for gainful crime is slight.

Most Magyars come to America with the expectation of returning
eventually to Hungary to live. For this reason few have acquired
citizenship and scarcely any immigrants from southeastern Europe
show less interest in the ballot. After a trip or two home and a
vain effort to settle down to life in the old country, many return
to America reconciled, to the prospect of ending their days here.


THE PORTUGUESE

Mongrelism and social decay have hurt the southwest of Europe even
more than the Turk has hurt the southeast. This is why the 60,000
Portuguese in the United States are, in point of culture, behind
even the Servians and the Macedonians. In the growing army of
foreign born illiterates they constitute the van. Not even the
Turks, Syrians or East Indians can vie with them. On arrival not
a third are able to read and write. As we find them in the cotton
mills 55 per cent. of them cannot speak English. Even after ten
years or more in our midst two Portuguese out of five cannot manage
the speech of the country.

There are two centers of Portuguese distribution--southeastern New
England and central California. California has 23,000 Portuguese
immigrants, Massachusetts 26,000, Rhode Island 6,000. In Boston
are 1,225, in Cambridge 2,000, in Providence 2,200, in Lowell
2,200, in New Bedford 4,000, in Fall River 14,000. We understand
why Portuguese should settle in California but what brings these
olive-skinned people to chilly New England? The answer takes us into
the realm of Chance. In the beginning of a stream of immigration
there is often romance. Then, if ever, accident counts and the
venturesome individual. Just as a fallen tree on the Continental
Divide may turn certain snow waters from the Pacific to the Gulf, so
a practice of New Bedford whalers a lifetime ago caused the crowded
Azores to overflow into Massachusetts instead of Brazil. In the old
days the whalers, after a summer cruise, touched at the Azores and
took on each from 25 to 35 natives. When after two or three years
of whaling they returned to New Bedford, some of these Azoreans
remained and a settlement grew up. To-day their quarter of New
Bedford, known as "Fayal," is very prosperous.

[Illustration: Courtesy of The Survey

Croatians Celebrating their Going Home to the "Old Country"]

[Illustration: Roumanian Couple in Gala Attire, Youngstown, O.]

All down Cape Cod these fishermen have well nigh replaced the
sea-faring Yankees. Provincetown, the spot where the Pilgrims first
landed and which was settled by the purest English, seems to-day a
South European town. Handsome dark-skinned Azoreans man the fishing
boats, Correa, Silva, Cabral, and Manta are the names on the shops
and the Roman Catholics outnumber those of any other denomination.

When the bottom fell out of whaling the New Bedford Portuguese went
into the cotton mills and their countrymen began coming in larger
numbers. Besides the "White Portuguese" have come in multitudes of
"Black Portuguese" from the Cape Verde islands. Three thousand of
them work during the season in the cranberry bogs of Massachusetts
and all other pickers flee before them. They are obviously negroid,
lack foresight and are so stupid they cannot follow a straight line.

The real Portuguese immigrate in families and show very little
money on landing. At home 70 per cent. of them were farmers or farm
laborers. They know sea and soil but bring no industrial skill.
If they cannot farm or fish they become day laborers, mill hands,
dockers, teamsters, draymen, stationary engineers or firemen. Many
of their women are in the needle trades.

In the mills the Portuguese do not shine. The men earn $8.00 a week,
while the rest of the foreign born average $12.00. Their sons
and daughters earn $9.50, whereas the second generation of other
immigrants average $14.00. They put wife and daughters into the mill
and stay out of labor unions. In eight cases out of nine they sleep
three or more in a room. In Lowell, according to the government
investigator, "The standard of living of the Portuguese, as judged
by the number of persons per apartment, room and sleeping room, is
much lower than that of any other race."

In Boston, "Among the Portuguese poverty is greater and more
hopeless than it is among the Jews and Italians, although there are
no Portuguese in the almshouses. Few of the Portuguese are really
well to do while many are partially dependent because the labor
of the women, who are often obliged to support the family, is too
unremunerative to ensure their independence. Portuguese women who
have shown their low moral sense by rearing a family of fatherless
children exhibit their courage and industry by sewing early and late
to gain a meager living for their little ones."

Although unskilled, ignorant and segregated, the Portuguese commit
very little crime. Nevertheless, their moral standard is in some
respects exceedingly low. Says Dr. Bushee: "The idea of family
morality among them is almost primitive, resembling that of the
<DW64>s of the South. Not only are elopements made and repaid
in kind without involving further complications, but also what
anthropologists call 'sexual hospitality' is not unknown among
the Portuguese." They "are not free from drunkenness and thieving,
but these faults are more carefully concealed among them and fewer
arrests result than would be the case with other nationalities. Many
of the Portuguese men are idle and thriftless, and some of the women
are suspected of having been public women in the Azore Islands from
which they come."

In California the Portuguese live like the Italians, but while
the Italians coöperate in leasing land, the Portuguese are so
individualistic that they seldom rent or own land in partnership.
This has handicapped them in agricultural competition with the
Italians and the Japanese.

Their interest in education is of the feeblest. In the mill towns
the percentage of Portuguese children at home is much larger than
that of the English; although in this respect the showing of the
Fall River Poles is much worse. No other mill people have so large a
proportion of their children in the primary grades. The retardation
of Portuguese school children is high. In California their children
are taken out of school early and the few who go on are sent to
"business college" rather than to high school.

No immigrants care so little for citizenship as the Portuguese. Of
the men whose term of residence entitles them to claim citizenship
only 3.2 per cent. have become naturalized. At New Bedford only one
in twenty entitled to citizenship has sought it; whereas, of the
other foreign born, over half have taken steps to gain citizenship.
The Portuguese farmers of California, although prosperous, care
nothing for public affairs and not half of them take a newspaper.
They are interested only in making money, saving, and buying land.

Owing to their extreme clannishness assimilation is slow. In the
city they live in a quarter by themselves; in the country they form
a colony. They have their church life apart and their societies
center about their church. Although the thriving farmers are
improving their housing and standard of living, they are "inclined
to be clannish, partly because Americans do not care for their
society." The chief agents of assimilation are the children. Having
mingled with other children in the public schools, the young people
are taken into fraternal orders and share the social life of the
community. Moreover, the parents unconsciously raise their standard
of living through their efforts to gratify the wants inspired in
their children by contact with schoolmates coming from better homes.
If the second generation are soon to be segregated in parochial
schools, as are the children of the Poles and the French Canadians,
this happy assimilation of the Portuguese through their children
will be checked.


THE GREEKS

Practically all our 150,000 Greeks have joined us in the course
of a decade and a half. The immigrants are mostly young men and
the proportion of females is negligible. Fugitives from oppression
always bring their families; so that this stream almost without
women is the clearest proof that the immigration from Hellas is
purely economic. The Hellenic Government is democratic and popular,
military service is slight and there is no religious or political
oppression. What has happened is that the huge American orb has
swum within the ken of a little people about as numerous as the
population of New Jersey and the larger mass is exerting its solar
attraction. The peasant living on greens boiled in olive oil, who
eats meat three times a year and keeps without noticing it the 150
fasting days in the Greek calendar, has sniffed the flesh pots
of America. Hence a wild-fire exodus which has devastated whole
villages and threatens to deplete the labor force of the kingdom.

Says the emigrant when questioned as to his motive: "It is hard to
make a living here. America is rich, I can make more money there. It
is the money." "Money" is the keynote of Greek immigration. Flashy
strangers have gone about talking with the peasant in his furrow and
the shepherd on the hillside, exciting their imagination as to the
wonders of America and smoothing out the difficulties in the way of
migrating. In the earlier days of the movement one man made $50,000
a year from his network of agencies selling tickets and advancing
passage money on a mortgage. The letter to the home folks, written
by the Greek who has found footing in Lowell or Chicago and which
is read by or to every one in the village, has been seized upon by
money-lenders and they have lost no opportunity to encourage both
the writing and the wide circulation of such epistles. The result
is that, in the words of Professor Fairchild the closest student
of this immigration, "The whole Greek world may be said to be in
a fever of emigration. From the highlands and the lowlands of the
Morea, from Attica, Thessaly and Euboea, from Macedonia, Asia Minor
and the Islands, the strong young men with one accord are severing
home ties, leaving behind wives and sweethearts and thronging to the
shores of America in search of opportunity and fortune." "America is
a household word in almost every Greek family." "Greek immigrants
know to just what place in the United States they are going and have
a very definite idea of what work they are going to do."

Although there are 10,000 Greek mill hands in Lowell, there is a
strong tendency for the Greeks in America to take to certain lines
of business, such as candy-kitchens and confectionery stores,
ice-cream parlors, fruit carts, stands and stores, florist shops
and boot-blacking establishments. This is due to the fact that
this catering to the minor wants of the public admits of being
started on the curb with little capital and no experience. Once his
foot is on the first rung, the saving and commercial-minded Greek
climbs. From curb to stand, from stand to store, from little store
to big store, to the chain of stores, and to branch stores in
other cities--such are the stages in his upward path. As the Greeks
prosper, they do not venture out into untried lines, but scatter
into the smaller cities and towns in order to follow there the few
businesses in which they have become expert.

[Illustration: Magyar Peasant Woman

Note own embroidery on apron: "If I am pure and good, I expect to be
honored"]

[Illustration: Molokan from Russia

From a semi-wild tribe, members of which eat no meat]

If the immigration from Hellas keeps up, in twenty years the Greeks
will own the candy trade of the country, the soda fountains and
perhaps the fruit business. Born epicures and cooks the Greeks
are going into the catering of food. In Atlanta they have 35
restaurants, in St. Louis 26, in Pittsburgh 25, in Birmingham 12
hotels and 14 restaurants.

Although Greeks are very rarely farmers, we hear of them as fruit
raisers in California, miners in Utah, laborers on the railroads
and fishers on both our coasts. In the cotton mills the Greeks are
on a level with the more backward nationalities. They show little
mechanical ability and few have reached responsible posts. They are
sober and amenable to discipline, but some employers find them too
excitable and unsteady to be good workers.

The ugliest thistle patch we owe to Old-World seed is the serfdom
of thousands of Greek boys in the shoe-shining parlors that have
sprung up everywhere. In some parts of Greece the peasant sets his
children early to work in order that their earnings may leave him
free to loaf the livelong day in a coffee-house. Upon them, too,
he saddles the burden of providing dowries for their sisters.
Accordingly, in certain districts, the poor send away their boys
to the cities of Greece and Turkey, where they are hired out to
peddlers, grocers and restaurant keepers, who treat them badly and
work them unconscionably long hours. From such parents the Greek in
America has no difficulty in recruiting boys whom he exploits under
conditions that savor of slavery.

In thousands of Greek shoe-shining shops are working bound boys who
are miserably fed and lodged by their masters, paid $3.00 or $4.00
a week and required to turn over all tips. Often the tips alone
cover the boy's wages and keep, so that his labor costs the master
nothing. Seeing that from each boy the _padrone_ makes from $100 to
$200 a year, a chain of such establishments yields him a princely
income. No wonder the <DW64> bootblack and the Italian bootblack have
been forced to the wall.

The bound boys are on duty 15 or 16 hours a day and work every day
in the year. They get in their eating and sleeping as best they can.
They know no recreation. Late at night, completely exhausted, they
drop with their clothes on into a bed that must suffice for four or
five. Boys who have been in a city several years may learn nothing
of it save the shop, their living quarters and the streets between.
Since the _padrone's_ game is to keep his boys dumb and blind, they
are not allowed to talk freely with Greek customers. The moment a
customer talks with a boy, "trusties" crowd round to listen. No
truth can be gotten from the boys, concerning their age, their work
or their pay. To avoid the arm of the truant officer, no Greek bound
boy confesses to less than seventeen years. They are ignorant of
the rights and rewards of labor in this country and are told that,
if they leave their work, they will be arrested. Even their letters
home are read and censored.

The effects of this servitude on the boys are shocking. They miss
all schooling and years may elapse before they get their eyes open.
The study of English is the first step towards emancipation; but
where work is constant they miss even this chance and young men will
be found who have been shining shoes for years and feel no ambition
for anything else. The physical ravages of such work and confinement
are appalling. In their memorial to the Immigration Commission the
Greek physicians of Chicago say:

     "Young immigrants laboring in shoeshining places for a period
     of upwards of two years become afflicted with chronic gastritis
     and hepatitis. These diseases undermine their constitutions,
     so that if they continue longer at the same work they become
     afflicted with pulmonary tuberculosis. Being too ignorant to
     take precautionary measures, the disease is communicated to
     others by contagion."

They go on to ask the Government not to allow such bound boys to
land.

Through this peep hole we glimpse one secret of the immigrant's
sky-rocket commercial rise. Behold Stephanos, who landed ten years
ago without a drachma and now draws a cool thousand a month from
his business and is one of our solid men! "Wonderful!" exclaims the
innocent American. "What stuff there must be in him! Shows, too,
that the country is still full of good chances." The fact is the
worthy Stephanos lolls on the backs of a hundred unseen bootblacks
who are being ruined that he may prosper. When one considers
how mercilessly the immigrant landlord, banker, saloon keeper,
contractor or employment agent hoodwinks and fleeces his helpless
fellow countrymen, certain of the "successes" one hears of do not
seem so remarkable after all.


THE LEVANTINES

One hundred thousand immigrants from Asiatic Turkey introduce us to
certain very marked differences between the European civilization
and the Asiatic. In general, these Syrians, Armenians, Arabs and
Turks eschew alcohol, shun violence and give little trouble to the
police. They are thrifty, acquisitive and self supporting. Their
women folk are hedged and virtuous. Their native intelligence
is beyond question, they respect learning and they appreciate
educational opportunities for their children.

On the other hand, they tend to crowd, their standards of
cleanliness are low and they are greatly afflicted with _trachoma_,
an excludable eye disease. Their narrow range of interests throws
out in ugly relief their lust of gain, especially gain without
sweat. The Oriental attitude toward females shows itself in a great
difference between the sexes in illiteracy, and in the betrothal
of young girls to mature men whom they scarcely know. These people
love trade, particularly the individual bargain, which offers scope
for what is amiably called "a contest of wits" but is really the
ensnaring of the unsuspecting by the spider type. At a time when
our retail commerce has happily come to the "one-price" system, the
lustrous-eyed peddlers from the Levant bring in again the odious
haggling trade with its deceit and trickery.

[Illustration: A Finnish Woman by her Cabin of Hewn Logs in Northern
Wisconsin near Lake Superior]

[Illustration: Courtesy of The Survey

Some of Syracuse's Newer Citizens--a Greek and Two Turks]

That these immigrants lack physical and moral courage is conceded
even by their friends. They do not settle their quarrels on the
spot face to face but revenge themselves treacherously from behind
when they get a safe chance. Their feeling that truth is a luxury
not to be brought out on common occasions gives them an advantage
in a commercial system which takes for granted a good deal of
Anglo-Saxon straightforwardness. It needs but half an eye to see
that the "business ability" attributed to the prospering dealer
is often nothing but the practice of Oriental craft among the
unsuspicious. As the Romans found these people at the eastern end
of the Mediterranean, so we find them to-day, good looking, pliant,
clever, sometimes brilliant, but shifty and wanting in character.

When two peoples find that their standards repel like oil and water,
they do not care to associate. Naturally, then, the Oriental
immigrants tend to huddle in colonies in which they may live in
the old way, keep their pride and spare themselves the pains of
adjustment to American ideals. Not only do such colonies check the
assimilation of those who most need it, but they are apt to be nests
of congestion, disease and depravity, as well as hot-beds for the
propagation of false and impractical ideas of political and social
freedom.




CHAPTER IX

ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF IMMIGRATION


More and more immigration is an economic matter, a flow of men
rather than of families, seeking gain rather than religious and
political liberty. Those who bring anything but their hands are
a very small and diminishing contingent. Most of the money the
immigrant shows on landing has been supplied him for that purpose.
In 1882, when the old immigration reached its height, the public
domain was being carved up at a tremendous rate, and the home-seeker
predominated. When the crest of the new immigration arrived, in
1907, a quarter of a century later, free land was gone forever, and
the job-seeker predominated. Formerly the idea of wandering oversea
sprang up naturally among the intelligent and restless; now the
idea is sown broadcast by thousands of steamship agents and their
runners. In the tavern, knee to knee with the yokels, sits the
runner, and paints an El Dorado. The poor fellows will believe him
if he tells them the trees of America bear golden leaves. When the
"American fever" seizes upon the peasant, it is the obliging runner
who suggests mortgaging his home for the passage-money or who finds
a buyer for his cows.

Common laborers who have been in America are hired to go about
among the peasants, flash money, clink glasses, and tell of the
wonderful wages awaiting them. The decoy thus gets together a group
who elect him leader and pay him so much per head to guide them to
America. Little do the poor sheep suspect that their bell-wether
is paid by the steamship agent for forming the group and by the
employer to whom he delivers them. A forwarding business exists for
sending penniless laborers to America as if they were commercial
ware. Each leaves at home some relative under bonds that the
laborer will within a year pay a certain sum as cost and profit
of bringing him here, Parties, through-billed from their native
village by a professional money-lender, are met at the right points
by his confederates, coached in three lessons on what answers to
make at Ellis Island, and delivered finally to the Pittsburgh
"boarding-boss," or the Chicago saloon-keeper, who is recruiting
labor on commission for a steel mill or a construction gang.

The emigration of 5,000 Rumanian Jews between January and August,
1900, was brought about by steamship agents, who created great
excitement in Rumania by distributing glowing circulars about
America. One authority stated to the Immigration Commission that
two of the leading steamship lines had five or six thousand
ticket-agents in Galicia alone, and that there was "a great hunt for
emigrants" there. Selling steerage tickets to America is the chief
occupation of large numbers of persons in Austria-Hungary, Greece
and Russia, the main sources of undesirable aliens. In 1908 and 1909
the inflow and outflow of steerage-passengers through our ports
amounted to about a million and a half a year. Allowing an average
outlay of $50 a head, we have a movement furnishing $75,000,000 of
annual business to the foreign railway and steamship companies.
That a monster of this size grows dragon claws with which to defend
itself goes without saying.


CHEAP LABOR A RAIN OF MANNA

Still, it is not as cargo that the immigrant yields his biggest
dividends. But for him we could not have laid low so many forests,
dug up so much mineral, set going so many factories, or built up
such an export trade as we have. In most of the basic industries the
new immigrants constitute at least half the labor force. Although
millions have come in, there is no sign of supersaturation, no
progressive growth of lack of employment. Somehow new mines have
been opened and new mills started fast enough to swallow them up.
Virtually all of them are at work and, what is more, at work in an
efficient system under intelligent direction. Ivan produces much
more than he did at home, consumes more, and, above all, makes more
profit for his employer than the American he displaces. Thanks to
him, we have bigger outputs, tonnages, trade-balances, fortunes,
tips, and alimonies; also bigger slums, red-light districts,
breweries, hospitals, and death-rates.

To the employer of unskilled labor this flow of aliens, many of
them used to dirt floors, a vegetable diet, and child labor, and
ignorant of underclothing, newspapers, and trade unions, is like a
rain of manna. For, as regards foreign competitors, his own position
is a Gibraltar. When the European sends his capital hither, he puts
it into railroad securities yielding from four to seven per cent.,
thereby releasing American capital for investment in the enterprises
that pay from ten to thirty per cent. The foreign capitalist dares
not put up mill or refinery here, because he cannot well run such
concerns at long range. He may not invade the American market with
the products of his mill over there, because our tariff has been
designed to prevent just that thing.


ENDLESS INFLOW OF THE NEEDIEST

Thus, so long as he stays in his home market, the American
mill-owner is shielded from foreign competition, while the common
labor he requires is cheapened for him by the endless inflow of
the neediest meekest laborers to be found within the white race.
If in time they become ambitious and demanding, there are plenty
of "greenies" he can use to teach them a lesson. The "Hunkies" pay
their "bit" to the foreman for the job, are driven through the
twelve-hour day, and in time are scrapped with as little concern as
one throws away a thread-worn bolt. One steel-mill superintendent
received official notice to hire no man over thirty-five and keep no
man over forty-five. A plate-mill which had experienced no technical
improvement in ten years doubled its production per man by driving
the workers. No wonder, then, that in the forty years the American
capitalist has had Aladdin's lamp to rub, his profits from mill and
steel works, from packing-house and glass factory, have created a
sensational "prosperity," of which a constantly diminishing part
leaks down to the wage-earners. Nevertheless, the system which
allows the manufacturer to buy at a semi-European wage much of the
labor that he converts into goods to sell at an American price has
been maintained as "the protection of American labor"!

[Illustration: Sunday Group of Roumanian Steel Workers, Youngstown,
O.]

[Illustration: Sunday Roumanians, Youngstown, O.]


THE NEW IMMIGRATION AND THE HIGH COST OF LIVING

Between 1900 and 1910, although population grew twenty-one per
cent., the output of the ten principal crops of the country
increased only nine per cent. Between 1899 and 1911 the value of the
average acre's output of such crops increased seventy per cent.,
while its power to purchase the things the farmer buys was greater
by forty-two per cent. There has been a general upheaval of prices,
to be sure, but the price of farm produce has risen much faster and
farther than the price of other commodities. This is "the high cost
of living," and it is immigration that has made this imp shoot up
faster in the United States than anywhere else.

As long as good land lasted, our Government stimulated agriculture
by presenting a quarter-section to whoever would undertake to farm
wild land. This bounty overdid farming, until, in the middle of the
nineties, the cost of living had reached a minimum. With the ending
of free land, the upward turn was bound to come, but the change was
made more dramatic by the inpouring of ten millions of immigrants
without the knowledge, the means, or the inclination to engage in
farming. Among us there is one American white farmer for fourteen
American whites, one Scandinavian farmer for eight Scandinavians,
one German farmer for eleven Germans, one Irish farmer for forty
Irish; but it takes 130 Poles, Hungarians, or Italians in this
country to furnish one farmer. Failing to contribute their due quota
to the production of food, these late-comers have ruptured the
equilibrium between field and mill, and made the high cost of living
a burning question. Just as the homestead policy overstimulated the
growth of farms, the new immigration has overstimulated the growth
of factories.


IMMIGRANTS AND AGRICULTURE

Nevertheless, certain of the South Europeans who are upon the soil
have something to show American farmers facing the problems of
intensive agriculture. Italians are teaching their neighbors how to
extract three crops a year from a soil already nourishing orchard or
vineyard. The Portuguese raise vegetables in their walnut groves,
grow currants between the rows of trees in the orchard, and beans
between the currant rows. They know how to prevent the splitting of
their laden fruit-trees by inducing a living brace to grow between
opposite branches. The blackbeetle problem they solve by planting
tomato slips inclosed in paper. From the <DW72>s looking out on the
Adriatic the Dalmatian brings a horticultural cunning which the
American fruit-grower should be eager to acquire.

The conversion of New Jersey barrens into berry farms, vineyards,
and pepper fields, the reclamation of muck soil in western New York,
which Americans were not willing to touch, the transmutation of wild
Ozark lands into apples and peaches, are Italian exploits which
constitute clear gain for the country. But there are other immigrant
farmers whose labors count on the wrong side of the national ledger.
Not a few Slav colonies are clearing and tilling land so poor or
so steep that it ought never to have been brought under the plow.
The soil they have deforested will presently wash into the rivers,
leaving stripped rocky <DW72>s to grin, like a Death's-head, in the
landscape. The nation will have to pay for it, just as France paid
for the reckless ax work that went on under the First Republic.


HELPING THE IMMIGRANT TO GET UPON THE SOIL

When confronted with the undeniable evils resulting from the
crowding of old-world peasants into American slums and factories,
the opponents of restriction urge that the trouble is with the
distribution of the immigrants, there are not really too many of
them, but they are congested in certain centers and industries.
Then let the state or the nation take the immigrant in hand and
settle him upon the soil, where there is room for him and where he
yearns to be. Supply him with the best of information, guidance and
supervision and lend him a little money until he has gotten upon
his feet. Successful state colonization would, no doubt, restore
the balance between agriculture and manufactures and prevent
the heartbreaking waste and misery resulting from the present
hap-hazard, catch-as-catch-can distribution of immigrants among
American opportunities.

Two other consequences ought, however, to be evident; First, the
policy would tend to use up the agricultural opportunities Americans
may prefer to hold open for their children and grandchildren.
Second, State help to the immigrant would furnish splendid
advertising matter to the steamship companies endeavoring to fill
more steerages and might soon swell the number of arrivals to a
million and a half or two millions a year. If we wish to have more
immigrants and to fill up this country in the briefest possible
time, state colonization is just the way to go about it. On the
other hand, once the volume of immigration has been brought under
effective control, the policy of aiding the immigrant to get upon
the land is heartily to be commended.

[Illustration: Photograph by Hine. Courtesy of The Survey

The Unemployed--Middle of the Morning, Chicago]


INDUSTRIAL DISPLACEMENT

The facts assembled by the Immigration Commission shatter the rosy
theory that foreign labor is drawn into an industry only when native
labor is not to be had. The Slavs and Magyars were introduced into
Pennsylvania forty-odd years ago by mine-operators looking for
more tractable miners. Agents were sent abroad to gather up labor,
and frequently foreigners were brought in when a strike was on.
The first instance seems to have occurred in Drifton in 1870, and
resulted in the importation of two ship-loads of Hungarians. The
process of replacing the too-demanding American, Welsh, and Irish
miners with labor from Austria-Hungary went on so rapidly that by
the middle of the nineties, the change was accomplished. In 1904,
during a strike in the coal-fields near Birmingham, Alabama, many
South Europeans were brought in. In 1908 "the larger companies
imported a number of immigrants," so that the strike was broken and
unionism destroyed in that region. In 1880, in the first strike in
the coal-mines of Kansas, "the first immigrants from Italy were
brought into the fields as strike-breakers."

Poles were introduced into South Cleveland in 1882 to replace
strikers in the wire-mills. The meat-packing strike of 1904 in
Chicago was broken with trainloads of <DW64>s, Italians and Greeks.
In 1883 the largest oil-refining company at Bayonne, New Jersey, "in
order to break the strike among the Irish and American coopers, ...
introduced great numbers of Slovaks, Ruthenians, and Poles." In 1887
a coal-dockers' strike was broken with Magyars, and in 1904 striking
boiler-makers were replaced by Poles. The striking glass-workers in
1904 were beaten by the introduction of Slovaks, Italians, Poles
and Magyars. During the 1907 strike in the iron-mines of northern
Minnesota, "one of the larger companies imported large numbers of
Montenegrins and other Southeastern races as strike-breakers, while
a few of the smaller companies brought into the region a number of
German-Austrians." "One mining company imported as many as 1300 of
these strike-breakers."

The hejira of the English-speaking soft-coal miners shows what must
happen when low-standard men undercut high-standard men. The miners
of Pennsylvania and West Virginia, finding their unions wrecked
and their lot growing worse under the floods of men from southern
and eastern Europe, migrated in great numbers to the Middle West
and the Southwest. But of late the coal-fields of the Middle West
have been invaded by multitudes of Italians, Croatians, Poles, and
Lithuanians, so that even here American and Americanized miners
have their backs to the wall. As for the displaced trade-unionists
who sought asylum in the mines of Oklahoma and Kansas, the pouring
in of raw immigrants has weakened their bargaining power, and many
have gone on to make a last stand in the mines of New Mexico and
Colorado.

Each exodus left behind an inert element which accepted the harder
conditions that came in with the immigrants, and a strong element
that rose to better posts in the mines or in other occupations. As
for the displaced, the Iliad of their woes has never been sung--the
loss of homes, the shattering of hopes, the untimely setting to
work of children, the struggle for a new foothold, and the turning
of thousands of self-respecting men into day laborers, odd-job men,
down-and-out-ers, and "hoboes."


IMMIGRANTS AND LABOR ORGANIZATIONS

The dramatic unionization of the garment industries in our large
cities has misled the public as to the actual effect of recent
immigration upon trade-unions. The fact is that the immigrants from
the backward parts of Europe tend to weaken, if not to shatter,
labor organizations in the fields they enter. They arrive needy and
eager to get any work at almost any pay. Having had no industrial
experience in the old country, they lack the trade-union idea.
Without our speech, and often illiterate, they are very hard to
reach and to bring into line. So far as they are transients, who
are not staking their future on the industry, they are loath to pay
union dues and to run the risk of having to strike. It is true that
the labor organizer evangelizes the alien workers with his union
gospel; but by the time one batch has been welded into a fighting
force, another batch is on his hands. His work, like Penelope's
web, is raveled out about as fast as it is woven. No wonder that
in the cotton industry unionism has been wrecked, while, of the
iron miners, less than two per cent. belong to unions. In 1901 the
United States Steel Corporation's constituent companies signed
agreements with two-thirds of their 125,000 workmen, among whom the
English-speaking held a dominant place. Ten years later the company
signed not a single agreement with its beaten mass of Slav-Latins.
There was no union with which to sign. The organizing, organizable
Americans had been deleted from the works. No wonder that organized
labor demands restriction of immigration. While the inrush
continues, the lines of labor will be weak, forming, breaking, and
reforming in the face of the intrenchments of capital.


IMMIGRANTS AND WAGES

During the last fifteen years the flood of gold has brought in a
spring-tide of prices. Since 1896 the retail cost to Americans of
their fifteen principal articles of food has risen seventy per
cent. Wages should have risen in like degree if the workman is to
retain his old standard, to say nothing of keeping his place in a
social procession which is continually mounting to higher economic
levels. We know that by 1907 wages had risen twenty-eight per cent.,
while retail prices were rising twenty-six per cent. Evidently
the working man was falling behind in the social procession. In
the soft-coal field of Pennsylvania, where the Slav dominates, the
coal-worker receives forty-two cents a day less than the coal-worker
in the mines of the Middle West and Southwest, where he does not
dominate. In meat-packing, iron and steel, cotton manufacture, and
other foreignized industries the inertia of wages has been very
marked. The presence of the immigrant has prevented a wage advance
which otherwise must have occurred.

[Illustration: "Shack" of a Polish Iron Miner, Hibbing, Minn.]

[Illustration: Cabin of an Austrian Iron Miner, Virginia, Minn.]

What a college man saw in a copper-mine in the Southwest gives in a
nutshell the logic of low wages.

The American miners, getting $2.75 a day, are abruptly displaced
without a strike by a trainload of five hundred raw Italians brought
in by the company and put to work at from $1.50 to $2 a day. For
the Americans there is nothing to do but to "go down the road." At
first the Italians live on bread and beer, never wash, wear the
same filthy clothes night and day, and are despised. After two or
three years they want to live better, wear decent clothes, and be
respected. They ask for more wages, the bosses bring in another
trainload from the steerage, and the partly Americanized Italians
follow the American miners "down the road." No wonder that the
estimate of government experts as to the number of our floating
casual laborers ranges up to five millions!


IMMIGRANTS AND CONDITIONS OF WORK

"The best we get in the mill now is greenhorns," said the
superintendent of a tube mill. "When they first come, they put their
heart into it and give a full day's work. But after a while they
begin to shirk and do as little as they dare." It is during this
early innocence that the immigrant accepts conditions he ought to
spurn. This same mill had to break up the practice of selling jobs
by foremen. In one concern the boss who sold a job would dismiss the
man after a fortnight and sell the job again, while another boss
in the same works would take on the dismissed man for a fee. On
the Great Northern Railroad the bosses mulcted each Greek laborer
a dollar a month for "interpreter." The "bird of passage," who
comes here to get ahead rather than to live, not only accepts, the
seven-day week and the twelve-hour day, but often demands them. Big
earnings blind him to the physiological cost of overwork. It is the
American or the half-Americanized foreigner who rebels against the
eighty-four-hour schedule.

When capital plays lord of the manor, the Old World furnishes the
serfs. In some coal districts of West Virginia the land, streets,
paths, roads, the miners' cabins, the store, the school, and the
church are all owned and controlled by the coal company. The company
pays the teacher, and no priest or clergyman objectionable to it may
remain on its domain. One may not step off the railroad's right
of way, pass through the streets, visit mine or cabin, without
permission. There is no place where miners meeting to discuss
their grievances may not be dispersed as trespassers. Any miner
who talks against his boss or complains of conditions is promptly
dismissed, and ejected from the 35,000 acres of company land. Hired
sluggers, known as the "wrecking-gang," beat up or even murder the
organizer who tries to reach the miners. No saloon, gambling-hall,
or bawdy-house is tolerated on company land. Even the beer wagon may
not deliver beer at houses to which the superintendent objects.

It is needless to add that the miners are all <DW64>s or foreigners.


IS THE FOREIGNER INDISPENSABLE?

After an industry has been foreignized, the notion becomes fixed in
the minds of the bosses that without the immigrants the industry
would come to a standstill.

"If is wasn't for the Slavs," say the superintendents of the Mesaba
Mines, "we couldn't get out this ore at all, and Pittsburgh would
be smokeless. You can't get an American to work here unless he runs
a locomotive or a steam-shovel. We've tried it; brought 'em in,
carloads at a time, and they left."

"Wouldn't they stay for three dollars a day?" I suggested, "even if
two dollars and ten cents isn't enough?"

"No, it's not a matter of pay. Somehow Americans nowadays aren't
any good for hard or dirty work."

Hard work! And I think of Americans I have seen in that last
asylum of the native born, the Far West, slaving with ax and
hook, hewing logs for a cabin, ripping out boulders for a road,
digging irrigation-ditches, drilling the granite, or timbering the
drift--Americans shying at open-pit, steam-shovel mining!

The secret is that with the insweep of the unintelligible bunk-house
foreigner there grows up a driving and cursing of labor which no
self-respecting American will endure. Nor can he bear to be despised
as the foreigner is. It is not the work or the pay that he minds,
but the stigma. This is why, when a labor force has come to be
mostly Slav, it will soon be all Slav. But if the supply of raw
Slavs were cut off, the standards and status of the laborers would
rise, and the Americans would come into the industry.

Some bosses argue for a continuous supply of green foreigners
because the sons of the immigrants are "above their fathers' jobs."
A strange industry this! Britain's iron industry is manned by
Britons, Germany's by Germans, but we are to believe that America's
iron industry is an exotic which can attract neither native
Americans nor the sons of immigrants. The truth is that the school
and other civilizing agencies have turned Michael's boy not against
hard work, but against the contempt with which his father's kind
of work is tainted. But for the endless stream of transients with
their pigsty mode of life, their brawls and their animal pleasures,
the stigma on the work would vanish, and the son of the immigrant
would be willing to inherit his father's job.

[Illustration: Photograph by Burke & Atwell. Courtesy of The Survey

Immigrant Girls Coming to Work in the Early Morning at the Union
Stockyards]

[Illustration: Photograph by Townsend. Courtesy of The Survey

Polish Girls Washing Dishes under the Sidewalk in a Chicago
Restaurant. The only Light is Artificial]


IMMIGRANT WOMEN DOING MEN'S WORK

While millions of women are being drawn from the home into industry,
the popular ideal of womanhood serves as a precious safeguard,
turning them away from coarsening occupations which might rob
them of health or youth or refinement. But this ideal, which is
higher among the American working-men than among the workers of
any other people, is menaced by the new immigrants, with their
peasant notions of womanhood. The Slavs and the Italians are not
in the least queasy about putting their women into heavy and dirty
work, such as core-making, glass-grinding, and hide-scraping, which
self-respecting American girls will not touch. The employer realizes
this, and continually tries these women in male occupations, with
the object of substituting them for men, beating down men's wages
or breaking a men's strike. Engaging in such masculine work not
only prevents immigrant women from rising to the American woman's
sense of self-respect, but it hinders their men from developing the
American man's spirit of chivalry. What is more, the extension of
woman's sphere on the wrong side underlines the native standard of
womanliness, so that native girls are perhaps being drawn into work
that denies them refinement and romance.


WHAT BECOMES OF DISPLACED AMERICANS

Does the man the immigrant displaces rise or sink? The theory
that the immigrant pushes him up is not without some color of
truth. In Cleveland the American, German, and Bohemian iron-mill
workers displaced within the last fifteen years seem to have been
reabsorbed into other growing industries. They are engineers
and firemen, bricklayers, carpenters, slaters, structural
iron-workers, steam-fitters, plumbers and printers. Leaving pick and
wheelbarrow to Italian and Slav, the Irish are now meter-readers,
wire-stringers, conductors, motormen, porters, janitors, caretakers,
night-watchmen, and elevator-men. I find no sign that either the
displaced workman or his sons have suffered from the advent of
Pole and Magyar. Some may have migrated, but certainly those left
have easier work and better pay. It is as though the alien tide
had passed beneath them and lifted them up. On the other hand, in
Pittsburgh and vicinity the new immigration has been like a flood
sweeping away the jobs, homes, and standards of great numbers, and
obliging them to save themselves by accepting poorer occupations or
fleeing to the West. The cause of the difference is that Pittsburgh
held to the basic industries, while in Cleveland numerous high-grade
manufactures started up which absorbed the displaced workmen into
the upper part of their labor force.


OUR STANDARD OF LIVING CRUMBLES

Unless there is some such collateral growth of skill-demanding
industries, the new immigrants bring disaster to many of the
working-men they undercut. The expansion of the industry will create
some good jobs, but not enough to reabsorb the Americans displaced.
Thus in the iron-ore-mines of Minnesota, out of seventy-five men
kept busy by one steam-shovel, only thirteen get $2.50 a day or
more, and $2.50 is the least that will maintain a family on the
American standard. It is plain that the advent of sixty-two cheap
immigrants might displace sixty-two Americans or Irish, while
the setting up of an additional steam shovel would create only
thirteen decent-wage jobs for them. Scarcely any industry can grow
fast enough to reabsorb into skilled or semi-skilled positions the
displaced workmen.

Employers observe a tendency for employment to become more
fluctuating and seasonal because of access to an elastic supply of
aliens, without family or local attachments, ready to go anywhere
or do anything. In certain centers, immigrant laborers form, as it
were, visible living pools from which the employer can dip as he
needs. Why should he smooth out his work evenly through the year in
order to keep a labor force composed of family men with local roots
when he can always take on "ginnies" without trouble and drop them
without compunction? Railroad shops are coming to hire and to "fire"
men as they need them instead of relying on the experienced regular
employees. In a concern with 30,000 employees, the rate of change is
a hundred per cent. a year, and is increasing! Labor leaders notice
that employment is becoming more fluctuating, there are fewer steady
jobs, and the proportion of men who are justified in founding a home
constantly diminishes.


IMMIGRATION AND CRISES

The fact that during an acute industrial depression in this
country the immigrant stream not only runs low, but the departures
may exceed the arrivals (as in the eight months following the
1907 panic, when there was a decrease of 124,124 in our alien
population), has been made the foundation for the argument that
surplus immigrant labor, by promptly taking itself off when times
are bad here, relieves the labor market and hastens the return to
normal conditions. It is overlooked that only the prosperous go,
leaving upon us the burden of the weak unemployed aliens. Moreover,
at the first sign of returning prosperity, a freshet of immigrants
starts up, thereby checking sharply the good-times tendency toward
higher wages and better working conditions.


THE RISE OF SOCIAL PRESSURE

Free land, coupled with high individual efficiency, has made this
country a low-pressure area. It ought to remain such, because
individualistic democracy forbids a blind animal-like increase
of numbers. By causing the population to accommodate itself to
opportunities, our democracy solves the Sphinx's riddle and opens
a bright prospect of continuous social progress. But of late that
prospect has been clouded. The streaming in from the backward lands
is sensibly converting this country from a low-pressure area into
a high-pressure area. It is nearly a generation since the stress,
registered in the labor-market, caused the British working-man to
fight shy of America. It is twenty years since it reached the point
at which the German working-man, already on the up-grade at home,
ceased to be drawn to America. As the saturation of our labor-market
by cheaper and ever cheaper human beings raises the pressure-gage,
we fail to attract as of yore such peoples as the North Italians and
the Magyars.

[Illustration: Roumanian Shepherds in Native Costume, Ellis Island]

In 1898 few came to us from east of Hungary. Now we are receiving
them from Asiatic Turkey, Circassia, Syria, and Arabia. An
immigration has started up from Persia, and conditions are ripe
for a heavy influx from western Asia. These remote regions, which
have had only twilight from Europe's forenoon, are high-pressure
areas. Their peoples are too many in relation to the opportunities
they know how to use. Until education, democratic ideas, and the
elevation of women restrict their increase, or machine industry
widens their opportunities, these regions will continue to produce
a surplus of people, which the enterprising avarice of steamship
companies will make ever more mobile and more threatening to
the wage-earners of an advanced country. Only lately comes the
announcement that one of the trans-Atlantic lines is about to run
its steamships through the Dardanelles and Bosphorus into Black
Sea ports in order to bring immigrants direct to America from
southeastern Europe without the expense of the long haul overland to
Hamburg.

If an air-chamber be successively connected by pipes with a large
number of tanks of compressed air, the pressure within the chamber
must rise. Similarly, if a low-pressure society be connected by
cheap steam-transportation with several high-pressure societies, and
allows them freely to discharge into it their surplus population,
the pressure in that society must rise. But for Chinese exclusion we
should by this time have six or eight million Celestials in the far
West, and mud villages and bamboo huts would fill the noble valleys
of California. Something like this must occur as we go on draining
away surplus people from larger and larger areas of high-pressure.

Immigration raises the pressure-gage at once for laborers, but only
gradually for other classes. It is the children of the immigrants
who communicate the pressure to all social levels. The investor,
landowner, or contractor profits by the coming in of bare-handed
men, and can well afford to preach world-wide brotherhood. The
professional man, sitting secure above the arena of struggle, can
nobly rebuke narrowness and race hatred. Throughout our comfortable
classes one finds high-sounding humanitarianism and facile
lip-sympathy for immigrants coexisting with heartless indifference
to what depressive immigration is doing and will do to American
wage-earners and their children. If the stream of immigration
included capitalists with funds, merchants ready to invade all lines
of business, lawyers, doctors, engineers, and professors qualified
to compete immediately with our professional men, even judges and
officials able to lure votes away from our own candidates for
office, the pressure would be felt all along the line, and there
might be something heroic in these groups standing for the equal
right of all races to American opportunities. But since actually the
brunt is borne by labor, it is easy for the shielded to indulge in
generous views on the subject of immigration.




CHAPTER X

SOCIAL EFFECTS OF IMMIGRATION


There is a certain anthracite town of 26,000 inhabitants in which
are writ large the moral and social consequences of injecting 10,000
sixteenth-century people into a twentieth-century community. By
their presence the foreigners necessarily lower the general plane
of intelligence, self-restraint, refinement, orderliness, and
efficiency. With them, of course, comes an increase of drink and of
the crimes from drink. The great excess of men among them leads to
sexual immorality and the diffusion of private diseases. A primitive
midwifery is practised, and the ignorance of the poor mothers fills
the cemetery with tiny graves. The women go about their homes
barefoot, and their rooms and clothing reek with the odors of
cooking and uncleanliness. The standards of modesty are Elizabethan.
The miners bathe in the kitchen before the females and children of
the household, and women soon to become mothers appear in public
unconcerned. The foreigners attend church regularly, but their noisy
amusements banish the quiet Sunday. The foreign men, three-eighths
of whom are illiterate, pride themselves on their physical strength
rather than on their skill, and are willing to take jobs requiring
nothing but brawn.

Barriers of speech, education, and religious faith split the
people into unsympathetic, even hostile camps. The worst element
in the community makes use of the ignorance and venality of the
foreign-born voters to exclude the better citizens from any share
in the control of local affairs. In this babel no newspaper becomes
strong enough to mold and lead public opinion. On account of the
smallness of the English-reading public,--the native born men number
slightly over two thousand and those of American parentage less
than a thousand--the single English daily has so few subscribers
that it cannot afford to offend any of them by exposing municipal
rottenness. The chance to prey on the ignorant foreigner tempts the
cupidity and corrupts the ethics of local business and professional
men. The Slavic thirst, multiplying saloons up to one for every
twenty-six families, is communicated to Americans, and results in
an increase of liquor crimes among all classes. In like manner
familiarity with the immodesties of the foreigners coarsens the
native-born.

With the basest Americans and the lowest foreigners united by
thirst and greed, while the decent Americans and the decent
foreigners understand one another too little for team-work, it is
not surprising that the municipal government is poor and that the
taxpayers are robbed. Only a few of the main streets are paved; the
rest are muddy and poorly guttered. Outside the central portion
of the city one meets with open sewage, garbage, dung-heaps, and
foul odors. Sidewalks are lacking or in bad repair. The police
force, composed of four Lithuanians, two Poles, one German, and one
Irishman, is so inefficient that "pistol-toting" after nightfall is
common among all classes. At times hold-ups have been so frequent
that it was not considered safe for a well-dressed person to show
himself in the foreign sections after dark. In the words of a
prominent local criminal lawyer:

     We have a police force that can't speak English. Within the last
     few years there have been six unavenged murders in this town.
     Why, if there were anybody I wanted to get rid of, I'd entice
     him here, shoot him down in the street, and then go around and
     say good-by to the police.

Here in a nutshell are presented the social effects that naturally
follow the introduction into an advanced people of great numbers of
backward immigrants. One need not question the fundamental worth
of the immigrants or their possibilities in order to argue that
they must act as a drag on the social progress of the nation that
incorporates them.


ILLITERACY

Among us there are now two million foreign-born illiterates, while
the number of foreign-born men of voting age unable to read and
write has passed the million mark. The confessed illiteracy of the
multitudes coming from southern and eastern Europe is 35.8 per
cent., as against 2.7 per cent. for the dwindling streams from the
North and West. We know that the actual state is somewhat worse
than these figures indicate, because many unlettered aliens fearing
rejection falsely declare themselves able to read and write. If the
lands of ignorance continue to discharge unhindered their surplus
into our country, we must resign ourselves to having numbers of
fellow-citizens who, in the words of the Commissioner of Immigration
at New York, "do not know the days of the week, the months of the
year, their own ages, or the name of any country in Europe outside
their own." Or, as another official puts it:

     In our daily official duties we come to know as belonging to
     a normal human adult type the individual who cannot count to
     twenty every time correctly; who can tell the sum of two and
     two, but not of nine and six; name the days of the week, but not
     the months of the year; who knows that he has arrived at New
     York or Boston, as the case may be, but does not know the route
     he followed from his home or how long it took to reach here; who
     says he is destined to America, but has to rely on showing a
     written address for further particulars; who swears he paid his
     own passage, but is unable to tell what it cost, and at the same
     time shows an order for railroad transportation to destination
     prepaid in this country.

While sister countries are fast nearing the goal of complete adult
literacy, deteriorating immigration makes it very hard to lift the
plane of popular intelligence in the United States. The foreign-born
between twenty and thirty-four years of age, late-comers of course,
show five times the illiteracy of native whites of the same age. But
those above forty-five years of age, mostly earlier immigrants, have
scarcely twice the illiteracy of native whites above forty-five.
This shows how much wider is the gulf between the Americans of
to-day and the new immigrants than that between the Americans of a
generation ago and the old immigrants.

Thanks to extraordinary educational efforts, the illiteracy of
native white voters dropped a third during the last decade; that
is, from 4.9 per cent. to 3.5 per cent. But the illiteracy of the
foreign-born men rose to 12 per cent.; so that the proportion of
white men in this country unable to read and write any language
declined only 9 per cent. when, but for the influx of illiterates,
it would have fallen 30 per cent.

In the despatches of August 16, 1912, is an account of a gathering
of ten thousand afflicted people at a shrine at Carey, Ohio, reputed
to possess a miraculous healing virtue. Special trains brought
together multitudes of credulous, and at least one "miracle" was
reported. As this country fills up with the densely ignorant, there
will be more of this sort of thing. The characteristic features of
the Middle Ages may be expected to appear among us to the degree
that our population comes to be composed of persons at the medieval
level of culture.


YELLOW JOURNALISM

In accounting for yellow journalism, no one seems to have noticed
that the saffron newspapers are aimed at a sub-American mind groping
its way out of a fog. The scare-heads, red and green ink, pictures,
words of one syllable, gong effects, and appeal to the primitive
emotions, are apt to jar upon the home-bred farmer or mechanic.
"After all," he reflects, "I am not a child." Since its success in
the great cities, this style of newspaper has been tried everywhere;
but it appears there are soils in which the "yellows" will not
thrive. When a population is sixty per cent. American stock, the
editor who takes for granted some intelligence in his readers
outlasts the howling dervish. But when the native stock falls below
thirty per cent. and the foreign element exceeds it, yellowness
tends to become endemic. False simplicity, distortion, and crude
emotionalism are the resources of newspapers striving to reach and
interest undeveloped minds. But the arts that win the immigrant
deprave the taste of native readers and lower the intelligence of
the community.


PEONAGE

The friendless, exploitable alien by his presence tends to corrupt
our laws and practices respecting labor. In 1908 the House of
Representatives directed the Immigration Commission to report
on the treatment and conditions of work of immigrants in certain
Southern States "and other States." The last phrase was introduced
merely to avoid the appearance of sectionalism, for no congressman
dreamed that peonage existed anywhere save in the South. The
investigation disclosed, however, the startling fact that immigrant
peonage exists in every State but Oklahoma and Connecticut. In the
West the commission found "many cases of involuntary servitude,"
but no prosecutions. It was in the lumber-camps of Maine that
the commission found "the most complete system of peonage in the
country."


CASTE SPIRIT

The desire to cure certain ills has been slow to develop among
us because the victims are aliens who, we imagine, don't mind
it very much. On learning that the low pay of the Italian navy
forbids meat, we recall that all Italians prefer macaroni, anyhow.
With downtrodden immigrants we do not sympathize as we would with
downtrodden Americans. The foreign-born laborers are "<DW77>s" and
don't count; the others are "white men." After a great mine disaster
a Pittsburgh newspaper posted the bulletin: "Four hundred miners
killed. Fifteen Americans." Of late a great split has opened between
the American and Americanized working-men and the foreigners, with
their new sense of being exploited and despised. The break shows
itself sensationally in the bitter fight between the American
Federation of Labor and the Industrial Workers of the World. The
former denounces the red-flag methods of the latter, ignores I.
W. W. strikes, and allows its members to become strike-breakers.
When the latter precipitates a strike in some industry in which the
Federationists are numerous, we shall see an unprecedented warfare
between native and foreign groups of working-men. It is significant
of the coming cleavage that the mother of the I. W. W., the Western
Federation of Miners, at once the most American and the most radical
of the great labor-unions, has disowned the daughter organization
since its leaders sought to rally inflammable and irresponsible
immigrants with the fierce cry, "Sabotage. No Truce."


THE POSITION OF WOMEN

Perhaps the most sensitive index of moral advancement is the
position assigned to woman. Never is there a genuine advance
that does not leave her more planet and less satellite. Until
recently nowhere else in the world did women enjoy the freedom and
encouragement they received in America. It is folly, however, to
suppose that their lot will not be affected by the presence of six
millions from belated Europe and from Asia, where consideration for
the weaker sex is certainly not greater than that of the English
before the Puritan Reformation.

With most of our Slavic nationalities, it is said, the boy may
strike his sister with impunity, but the girl who strikes her
brother is likely to be chastised. Few of the later immigrants
think of giving the daughter as good a chance as the son. Among the
American students in our colleges there are three young men to one
young woman. For the native students of foreign fathers the ratio is
four to one, and for the foreign-born eight to one.

The Italians keep their daughters close, and marry them off very
early. In the 1909 strike of the New York shirt-waist makers, all
the nationalities responded to the union ideal save the Italian
girls. More than that, hundreds of them slipped into the strikers'
jobs. Mystified by the strange, stolid resistance of the brown-eyed
girls to all entreaties, the strike-leaders visited their homes.
There they found that the Italian woman, instead of being a free
moral agent, is absolutely subject to the will of her nearest male
relative, and the man would not take the wife, sister, or daughter
out of the shop unless he was well paid for it.

East European peasants are brutal in the assertion of marital
rights, so when the poor immigrant woman, noticing the lot of the
American wife, comes to the point of rebelling against the overlarge
family, she runs the risk of rough treatment. Some nationalities
are almost Oriental in the way they seclude their women. It is
significant that the Ruthenian, Polish, Portuguese, South Italian,
and Greek female employees who have lived here from five to ten
years are further behind their men-folk in speaking English than
the women from northern and western Europe.

That the woman's movement in America is to meet with hard sledding
cannot be doubted. The yielding conservatism of our East has been
buttressed of late by the incorporation of millions of immigrants
bred in the coarse peasant philosophy of sex. It may be long before
women win in the East the recognition they have won in the more
American parts of the country. Recently the school board of New
York, on motion of Commissioner Abraham Stern, refused even to
allow discussion of a woman teacher's petition for a year's leave
of absence without pay in order to have a baby. This moved "_The
Independent_," which has been a Mark Tapley on the immigration
question, to remark: "The wave of recent immigration has brought
with it the Oriental conception of woman's status. A man whose
religion requires him every morning to thank God that he was not
born a woman is likely to treat women so that they will wish they
had been born men. We must not shut our eyes to the fact that in the
future the Christian conception of womanhood is not to be maintained
in this country without a struggle."


THE SOCIAL EVIL

From a half to three-fifths of the immigration of the period 1868-88
was male, but the new immigration shows a male preponderance of
about three to one. Among those from Austria there are 155 males to
100 females. Among those from Hungary the proportion is 161 to 100;
from Italy, 191; from Asiatic Turkey, 210; from European Turkey,
769; from the Balkan States, 1107; from Greece, 1192. A quarter of
the Polish husbands in industry, a third of the married Slovak and
Italian men, nearly half of the Magyars and Russians, three-fifths
of the Croatians, three-fourths of the Greeks and Rumanians, and
nine-tenths of the Bulgarians, have left their wives in the old
country!

Two million more immigrant men than immigrant women! Can any
one ask what this leads to? In colonial times the consequences
of split-family immigration were so bad that Massachusetts and
Connecticut passed laws requiring spouses to return to their mates
in England unless they were "come over to make way for their
families." We are broader-minded, and will interfere with nothing
that does not wound prosperity. The testimony of foreign consuls
and leaders among the foreign-born leaves no doubt that in some
instances the woman cook of the immigrant boarding-house is common
to the inmates.


HOUSING

In the South Side of Pittsburgh there are streets lined with
the decent homes of German steel-workers. A glance down the
paved passage leading to the rear of the house reveals absolute
cleanliness, and four times out of five one glimpses a tree, a
flower garden, an arbor, or a mass of vines. In Wood's Run, a few
miles away, one finds the Slavic laborers of the Pressed Steel
Car Company huddled in dilapidated rented dwellings so noisome
and repulsive that one must visit the lower quarters of Canton to
meet their like. One cause of the difference is that the Slavs are
largely transients, who do nothing to house themselves because they
are saving in order to return to their native village.

The fact that a growing proportion of our immigrants, having left
families behind them, form no strong local attachments and have no
desire to build homes here is one reason why of late the housing
problem has become acute in American industrial centers.


OVERGROWTH OF CITIES

Not least among the multiplying symptoms of social ill health in
this country is the undue growth of cities. A million city-dwellers
create ten times the amount of "problem" presented by a million on
the farms. Now, as one traverses the gamut that leads from farms
to towns, from towns to cities, and from little cities to big, the
proportion of American stock steadily diminishes while the foreign
stock increases its representation until in the great cities it
constitutes nearly three-fourths of the population. In 1910 the
percentage distribution of our white population was as follows:--

                            NATIVE
                            WHITE  FOREIGN  FOREIGN-
                            STOCK   STOCK    BORN

  Rural districts            64.1    20.8     7.5
  Cities 2,500-10,000        57.5    34.5    13.9
  Cities 10,000-25,000       50.4    42.     14.4
  Cities 25,000-100,000      45.9    46.7    20.2
  Cities 100,000-500,000     38.9    53.4    22.1
  Cities 500,000 and over    25.6    70.8    33.6

It is not that the immigrants love streets and crowds. Two-thirds of
them are farm bred, but they are dropped down in cities, and they
find it easier to herd there with their fellows than to make their
way into the open country. Our cities would be fewer and smaller
had they fed on nothing but country-bred Americans. The later alien
influx has rushed us into the thick of urban problems, and these
are gravest where Americans are fewest. Congestion, misliving,
segregation, corruption, and confusion are seen in motley groups
like Pittsburgh, Jersey City, Paterson, and Fall River rather than
in native centers like Indianapolis, Columbus, Nashville, and Los
Angeles.


PAUPERISM

Ten years ago two-fifths of the paupers in our almshouses were
foreign-born, but most of them had come over in the old careless
days when we allowed European poorhouses to send us their inmates.
Now that our authorities turn back such as appear likely to become a
public charge, the obvious pauper is not entering this country.
We know that virtually every Greek in America is self-supporting.
The Syrians are said to be singularly independent. The Slavs and the
Magyars are sturdy in spirit, and the numerous indigent Hebrews are
for the most part cared for by their own race.

[Illustration: Distribution of Foreign-Born Whites in the United
States--1910]

Nevertheless, dispensers of charity agree that many South Italians
are landing with the most extravagant ideas of what is coming to
them. They apply at once for relief with the air, "Here we are. Now
what are you going to do for us?" They even _insist_ on relief as
a right. At home it had been noised about that in foolish America
baskets of food are actually sent in to the needy, and some are
coming over expressly to obtain such largess. Probably none are so
infected with spiritual hookworm as the immigrants from Naples. It
will be recalled that when Garibaldi and his thousand were fighting
to break the Bourbon tyranny in the South, the Neapolitans would
hurrah for them, but would not even care for the wounded.

Says the Forty-seventh Annual Report of the New York Juvenile Asylum:

     It is remarkable that recently arrived immigrants who display
     small adaptability in American standards are by no means slow in
     learning about this and other institutions where they may safely
     leave their children to be fed, clothed, and cared for at the
     public expense. This is one of the inducements which led them to
     leave their native land.

Charity experts are very pessimistic as to what we shall see when
those who come in their youth have passed their prime and met the
cumulative effects of overwork, city life, drink, and vice. Still
darker are their forebodings for a second generation, reared too
often by ignorant, avaricious rustics lodging in damp cellars,
sleeping with their windows shut, and living on the bad, cheap food
of cities. Of the Italians in Boston Dr. Bushee writes:

     They show the beginnings of a degenerate class, such as has been
     fully developed among the Irish.... If allowed to continue in
     unwholesome conditions, we may be sure that the next generation
     will bring forth a large crop of dependents, delinquents and
     defectives to fill up our public institutions.

Says a charity superintendent working in a huge Polish quarter:

     It is the second generation that will give us trouble. The
     parents come with rugged peasant health, and many of them keep
     their strength even in the slum. But their children often
     start life weakened physically and mentally by the conditions
     under which they were reared. They have been raised in close,
     unsanitary quarters, in overlarge families, by parents who drunk
     up or saved too much, spent too little on the children, or
     worked them too soon. Their sole salvation is the open country,
     and they can't be pushed into the country. All of us are aghast
     at the weak fiber of the second generation. Every year I see the
     morass of helpless poverty getting bigger. The evil harvest of
     past mistakes is ripening, but it will take twenty years before
     we see the worst of it. If immigration were cut off short
     to-day, the burden from past neglect and exploitation would go
     on increasing for years.


THE WAYWARD CHILD OF THE IMMIGRANT

In 1908 nine-tenths of the 2600 complaints of children going wrong
made to the Juvenile Protective Association of Chicago related to
the children of immigrants. It is said that four-fifths of the
youths brought before the Juvenile Court of Chicago come from the
homes of the foreign-born. In Pittsburgh the proportion is at least
two-thirds. However startling these signs of moral breakdown in
the families of the new immigrants, there is nothing mysterious
about it. The lower the state from which the alien comes, the more
of a grotesque he will appear in the shrewd eyes of his partly
Americanized children. "Obedience to parents seems to be dying out
among the Jews," says a Boston charity visitor. "The children feel
it isn't necessary to obey a mother who wears a shawl or a father
who wears a full beard." "Sometimes it is the young daughter who
rules the Jewish family," observes a Pittsburgh settlement head,
"because she alone knows what is 'American.' But see how this
results in a great number of Jewish girls going astray. Since the
mother continues to shave her head and wear a wig as she did in
Poland, the daughter assumes that mother is equally old-fogyish when
she insists that a nice girl doesn't paint her face or run with boys
in the evening."

Through their knowledge of our speech and ways, the children have
a great advantage in their efforts to slip the parental leash.
The bad boy tells his father that whipping "doesn't go" in this
country. Reversing the natural order, the child becomes the fount
of knowledge, and the parents hang on the lips of their precocious
offspring. If the policeman inquires about some escapade or the
truant officer gives warning, it is the scamp himself who must
interpret between parent and officer. The immigrant is braced by
certain Old-World loyalties, but his child may grow up loyal to
nothing whatever, a rank egoist and an incorrigible who will give us
vast trouble before we are done with him.

Still, the child is not always to blame. "Often the homes are so
crowded and dirty," says a probation officer, "that no boy can
go right. The Slavs save so greedily that their children become
disgusted with the wretched home conditions and sleep out." One
hears of foreign-born with several boarders sending their children
out to beg or to steal coal. In one city investigation showed
that only a third of the Italian children taken from school on
their fourteenth birthday were needed as bread-winners. Their
parents thought only of the sixty cents a week. In another only
one-fourteenth of the Italian school children are above the primary
grades, and one-eleventh of the Slavic, as against two-fifths of
the American school children in grammar grades or high school.
Miss Addams tells of a young man from the south of Italy who
was mourning the death of his little girl of twelve. In his grief
he said quite simply: "She was my oldest kid. In two years she
would have supported me, and now I shall have to work five or six
years longer until the next one can do it." He expected to retire
permanently at the age of thirty-four.

[Illustration: Dependent Italian Family, Cleveland. (Two Children
Absent)]

[Illustration: Dependent Slovak Family, Cleveland]


INSANITY AMONG THE FOREIGN-BORN

Not only do the foreign-born appear to be more subject to insanity
than the native-born, but when insane they are more likely to become
a public charge. Of the asylum population they appear to constitute
about a third. In New York during the year ending September 30,
1911, 4218 patients who were immigrants or of immigrant parents
were admitted to the insane hospitals of the State. This is
three-quarters of the melancholy intake for that year. Only one out
of nine of the first admissions from New York City was of native
stock. The New York State Hospital Commission declares that "the
frequency of insanity in our foreign population is 2.19 times
greater than in those of native birth." In New York City it "is 2.48
times that of the native-born."

Excessive insanity is probably a part of the price the foreign-born
pay for the opportunities of a strange and stimulating environment,
with greater strains than some of them are able to bear. America
calls forth powerful reactions in these people. Here they feel
themselves in the grasp of giant forces they can neither withstand
nor comprehend. The passions and the exertions, the hopes and the
fears, the exultations and the despairs, America excites in the
immigrant are likely to be intenser than anything he would have
experienced in his natal village.

In view of the fact that every year New York cares for 15,000
foreign-born insane at a cost of $3,500,000 and that the State's
sad harvest of demented immigrants during the single year 1911 will
cost about $8,000,000 before they die or are discharged, there is
some offset to be made to the profits drawn from the immigrants by
the transporting companies, landlords, real-estate men, employers,
contractors, brewers, and liquor-dealers of the State. Besides,
there is the cost of the paupers and the law-breakers of foreign
origin. All such burdens, however, since they fall upon the
public at large, do not detract from or qualify that private or
business-man's prosperity which it is the office of the true modern
statesman to promote.


IMMIGRATION AND THE SEPARATE SCHOOL

In a polyglot mining town of Minnesota is a superintendent who has
made the public school a bigger factor in Americanization than I
have found it anywhere else. The law gives him the children until
they are sixteen, and he holds them all. His school buildings
are civic and social centers. Through the winter, in his high
school auditorium, which seats 1200 persons, he gives a course of
entertainment which is self-supporting, although his "talent"
for a single evening will cost as much as $200. By means of the
400 foreigners in his night schools he has a grip on the voters
which his foes have learned to dread. Under his lead the community
has broken the mine-boss collar and won real self-government. The
people trust him and bring him their troubles. He has jurisdiction
over everything that can affect the children of the town, and his
conception is wide. Wielding both legal and moral authority, he is,
as it were, a corporation president and a medieval bishop rolled
into one.

This man sets no limit to the transforming power of the public
school. He insists that the right sort of schooling will not only
alter the expression, but will even change the shape of the skull
and the bony formation of the face. In his office is a beautiful
tabouret made by a "wild boy" within a year after he had been
brought in kicking and screaming. He scoffs at the fear of a lack of
patriotism in the foreign-born or their children. He knows just how
to create the sentiment. He has flag drills and special programs,
and in the Fourth of July parade and the Decoration day procession
the schools have always a fine float. He declares he can build human
beings to order, and will not worry about immigration so long as the
public school is given a chance at the second generation.

But is the public school to have this chance?

Multitudes of the new immigrants adhere to churches which do not
believe in the public schools. "Their pupils," observed a priest
to me, "are like wild children." Said a bishop: "No branches can be
safely taught divorced from religion. We believe that geography,
history, and even language ought to be presented from our point of
view." Hence with great rapidity the children of Roman Catholics are
being drawn apart into parochial schools. In Cleveland one-third of
the population is supposed to be Catholic, and the 27,500 pupils in
the parochial schools are nearly one-third of all school children.
In Chicago there are 112,000 in the parish schools to 300,000 in the
public schools. In New York the proportion is about one-sixth. In
twenty-eight leading American cities the attendance of the parish
schools increased sixty per cent. between 1897 and 1910, as against
an increase of from forty-five to fifty per cent. in the attendance
of the public schools. The total number of children in the parochial
schools is about 1,400,000. Separate education is a settled Catholic
policy, and the bishops say they expect to enroll finally the
children of all their people.

To bring this about, the public schools are denounced from the
pulpit as "Godless" and "immoral," their product as mannerless and
disobedient. "We think," says a Slovak leader, "that the parochial
school pupils are more pious, more respectful toward parents and
toward all persons in authority." The Polish, Lithuanian, or
Slovak priest, less often the German or Bohemian, says bluntly:
"If you send your children to the public school, they will go
to hell." Sometimes the priest threatens to exclude from the
confessional parents who send their children to the public school.
An archbishop recently decreed that parents who without permission
send their children to the public school after they have made their
first communion "commit a grievous sin and cannot receive the
sacraments of the church." Within the immigrant groups there is
active opposition, but it appears to be futile. In the soft-coal
mining communities of Pennsylvania 9 per cent. of the children of
native white parentage attend the parochial schools, whereas 24
per cent. of the Polish children and 48 per cent. of the Slovak
children are in these schools. In a certain district in Chicago
where the public-school teachers had felt they could hold their
own, the foreign mothers came at last to take away their children's
school-books, weeping because they were forced to transfer their
children to the parish school.

Now, the parish school tends to segregate the children of
the foreign-born. Parishes are formed for groups of the same
speech, so a parish school will embrace children of only one
nationality--German, Polish, Bohemian, Lithuanian, Croatian, Slovak,
Magyar, Portuguese, or French Canadian, as the case may be. Often
priest and teachers have been imported, and only the mother-tongue
is used. "English," says a school superintendent, "comes to be
taught as a purely ornamental language, like French in the public
high school." Hence American-born children are leaving school not
only unable to read and write English, but scarcely able to speak
it. The foreign-speech school, while it binds the young to their
parents, to their people, and to the old country, cuts them off
from America. Says a Chicago Lithuanian leader: "There are 3000
of our children in the parochial schools here. The teachers are
ignorant, illiterate spinsters from Lithuania who have studied here
two or three years. When at fourteen the pupils quit school, they
are no more advanced than the public-school pupils of ten. This is
why 50,000 Lithuanians here have only twenty children in the high
school."

When, now, to the removal of the second generation from the public
school there is added, as is often the case, the endeavor to keep
them away from the social center, the small park field-house, the
public playground, the social settlement, the secular American press
and welfare work in the factories, it is plain that those optimists
who imagine that assimilation of the immigrant is proceeding
unhindered are living in a fool's paradise.


SOCIAL DECLINE

"Our descendants," a social worker remarked to me, "will look back
on the nineteenth century as our Golden Age, just as we look back
on Greece." Thoughtful people whose work takes them into the slime
at the bottom of our foreignized cities and industrial centers
find decline actually upon us. A visiting nurse who has worked
for seven years in the stock-yards district of Chicago reports
that of late the drinking habit is taking hold of foreign women at
an alarming rate. In the saloons there the dignified _stein_ has
given way to the beer pail. In the Range towns of Minnesota there
are 356 saloons, of which eighty-one are run by native-born, the
rest chiefly by recent immigrants. Into a Pennsylvania coal town of
1,800 people, mostly foreign-born, are shipped each week a car-load
of beer and a barrel of whisky. Where the new foreign-born are
numerous, women and children frequent the saloons as freely as the
men. In the cities family desertion is growing at a great rate among
foreign-born husbands. Facts are justifying the forecast made ten
years ago by H. G. Wells: "If things go on as they are going, the
great mass of them will remain a very low lower class--will remain
largely illiterate, industrialized peasants."

The continuance of depressive immigration will lead to nothing
catastrophic. Riots and labor strife will oftener break out, but the
country will certainly not weaken nor collapse. Of patriotism, of
the military type there will be no lack. Scientific and technical
advance will go on the same. The spread of business organization and
efficiency will continue. The only thing that will happen will be a
mysterious slackening in social progress. The mass will give signs
of sluggishness, and the social procession will be strung out.

We are engaged in a generous rivalry with the West Europeans and
the Australians to see which can do the most to lift the plane of
life of the masses. Presently we shall be dismayed by the sense of
falling behind. We shall be amazed to find the Swiss or the Danes
or the New Zealanders making strides we cannot match. Stung with
mortification at losing our erstwhile lead in the advancement of the
common people, we shall cast about for someone to blame. Ultimate
causes, of course, will be overlooked; only proximate causes will
be noticed. There will be loud outcry that mothers, or teachers, or
clergymen, or editors, or social workers are not doing their duty.
Our public schools, solely responsible as they obviously are for
the intellectual and moral characteristics of the people, will be
roundly denounced; and it will be argued that church schools must
take their place. There will be trying of this and trying of that,
together with much ingenious legislation. As peasantism spreads
and inertia proves unconquerable, the opinion will grow that the
old American faith in the capacity and desire of the common people
for improvement was a delusion, and that only the superior classes
care for progress. Not until the twenty-first century will the
philosophic historian be able to declare with scientific certitude
that the cause of the mysterious decline that came upon the American
people early in the twentieth century was the deterioration of
popular intelligence by the admission of great numbers of backward
immigrants.

[Illustration: Italian Men's Civic Club. Rochester. N. Y.]




CHAPTER XI

IMMIGRANTS IN POLITICS


On a single Chicago hoarding, before the spring election of 1912,
the writer saw the political placards of candidates with the
following names: Kelly, Cassidy, Slattery, Alschuler, Pfaelzer,
Bartzen, Umbach, Andersen, Romano, Knitckoff, Deneen, Hogue, Burres,
Short. The humor of calling "Anglo-Saxon" the kind of government
these gentlemen will give is obvious. At that time, of the eighteen
principal personages in the city government of Chicago, fourteen had
Irish names, and three had German names. Of the eleven principal
officials in the city government of Boston, nine had Irish names,
and of the forty-nine members of the Lower House from the city
of Boston, forty were obviously of Hibernian extraction. In San
Francisco, the mayor, all the heads of the municipal departments,
and ten out of eighteen members on the board of supervisors, bore
names reminiscent of the Green Isle. As far back as 1871, of 112
chiefs of police from twenty-two States who attended the national
police convention, seventy-seven bore Irish names, and eleven had
German names. In 1881, of the chiefs of police in forty-eight
cities, thirty-three were clearly Irish, and five were clearly
German.

In 1908, on the occasion of a "home-coming" celebration in Boston,
a newspaper told how the returning sons of Boston were "greeted by
Mayor Fitzgerald and the following members of Congress: O'Connell,
Kelihar, Sullivan, and McNary--following in the footsteps of
Webster, Sumner, Adams, and Hoar. They were told of the great work
as Mayor of the late beloved Patrick Collins. At the City Hall they
found the sons of Irish exiles and immigrants administering the
affairs of the metropolis of New England. Besides the Mayor, they
were greeted by John J. Murphy, Chairman of the board of assessors;
Commissioner of Streets Doyle; Commissioner of Baths O'Brien. Mr.
Coakley is the head of the Park Department, and Dr. Durgan directs
the Health Department. The Chief of the Fire Department is John
A. Mullen. Head of the Municipal Printing Plant is Mr. Whelan.
Superintendent of the Street Cleaning is Cummings; Superintendent of
Sewers Leahy; Superintendent of Buildings is Nolan; City Treasurer,
Slattery; Police Commissioner, O'Meara."

The Irish domination of our Northern cities is the broadest mark
immigration has left on American politics; the immigrants from
Ireland, for the most part excessively poor, never got their feet
upon the land as did the Germans and the Scandinavians, but remained
huddled in cities. United by strong race feelings, they held
together as voters, and, although never a clear majority, were able
in time to capture control of most of the greater municipalities.
Now, for all their fine Celtic traits, these Irish immigrants had
neither the temperament nor the training to make a success of
popular government. They were totally without experience of the kind
Americans had acquired in the working of democratic institutions.
The ordinary American by this time had become tinctured with the
spirit of legalism. Many voters were able to look beyond the persons
involved in a political contest and recognize the principles
at stake. Such popular maxims as: "No man should be a judge in
his own case," "The ballot a responsibility," "Patriotism above
party," "Measures, not men," "A public office is a public trust,"
fostered self-restraint and helped the voters to take an impersonal,
long-range view of political contests.

Warm-hearted, sociable, clannish, and untrained, the naturalized
Irish failed to respect the first principles of civics. "What is the
Constitution between friends?" expresses their point of view. In
their eyes, an election is not the decision of a great, impartial
jury, but a struggle between the "ins" and the "outs." Those who
vote the same way are "friends." To scratch or to bolt is to "go
back on your friends." Places and contracts are "spoils." The
official's first duty is to find berths for his supporters. Not
fitness, but party work, is one's title to a place on the municipal
pay-roll. The city employee is to serve his party rather than the
public that pays his salary. Even the justice of courts is to
become a matter of "pull" and "stand in," rather than of inflexible
rules.

A genial young Harvard man who has made the Good Government movement
a power in a certain New England city said to me: "The Germans want
to know which candidate is better qualified for the office. Among
the Irish I have never heard such a consideration mentioned. They
ask, 'Who wants this candidate?' 'Who is behind him?' I have lined
up a good many Irish in support of Good Government men, but never by
setting forth the merits of a matter or a candidate. I approach my
Irish friends with the personal appeal, 'Do this for me!' Nearly all
the Irish who support our cause do it on a personal loyalty basis.
The best of the Irish in this city have often done as much harm to
the cause of Good Government as the worst. Mayor C., a high-minded
Irishman desiring to do the best he could for the city, gave us as
bad a government as Mayor F., who thought of nothing but feathering
his own nest. Mayor C. 'stood by his friends.'"

The Hibernian domination has given our cities genial officials,
brave policemen, and gallant fire-fighters. It has also given them
the name of being the worst-governed cities in the civilized world.
The mismanagement and corruption of the great cities of America have
become a planetary scandal, and have dealt the principle of manhood
suffrage the worst blow it has received in the last half-century.
Since the close of the Civil War, hundreds of thousands of
city-dwellers have languished miserably or perished prematurely from
the bad water, bad housing, poor sanitation, and rampant vice in
American municipalities run on the principles of the Celtic clan.

On the other hand, it is likely that our British, Teutonic,
Scandinavian, and Jewish naturalized citizens--still more our
English-Canadian voters--have benefited American politics. In
politics men are swayed by passion, prejudice, or reason. By the
last quarter of the nineteenth century, the average American had
come to be on his guard against passion in politics, but not yet had
he reached the plane of reason. This left him the prey of prejudice.
Men inherited their politics, and bragged of having always "voted
straight." They voted Democratic for Jefferson's sake, or Republican
from love of Lincoln. The citizens followed ruts, while the selfish
interests "followed the ball." Now, the intelligent naturalized
foreigner, having inherited none of our prejudices, would not
respond to ancient cries or war-time issues. He inquired pointedly
what each party proposed to do _now_. The abandonment of "waving the
bloody shirt" and the sudden appearance of the politics of actuality
in the North, in the eighties, came about through the naturalization
of Karl and Ole. The South has few foreign-born voters, and the
South is precisely that part of the country in which the reign of
prejudice in politics has longest delayed the advent of efficient
and progressive government.

In 1910 there were certainly three million naturalized citizens
in the United States. In southern New England and New York they
constitute a quarter of all the white voters. The same is true of
Illinois and the Old Northwest. In Providence, Buffalo, Newark,
St. Paul, and Minneapolis, there are two foreign voters to three
native white voters. In Milwaukee, Detroit, Cleveland, and Boston,
the ratio is about one to two. In Paterson, Chicago, and New York,
the ratio is nearer three to five, and in Fall River it is three to
four. When the foreigners are intelligent and experienced in the
use of the ballot, their civic worth does not suffer by comparison
with that of the natives. Indianapolis and Kansas City, in which the
natives outnumber the naturalized ten to one, do not overshadow in
civic excellence the Twin Cities of Minnesota, with three natives
to two naturalized. Cleveland, in which the naturalized citizens
constitute a third, is politically superior to Cincinnati, in which
they are less than a sixth. Chicago, with thrice the proportion of
naturalized citizens Philadelphia has, was roused and struggling
with the python of corruption while yet the city by the Delaware
slept.


THE NEW IMMIGRATION AND CITIZENSHIP

Between 1895 and 1896 came the great shift in the sources of
immigration. In the former year, 55 per cent. of the aliens
came from northwestern Europe; in the next year, southern and
southeastern Europe gained the upper hand, and have kept it ever
since. With the change in nationalities came a great change in the
civic attitude of the immigrants. The Immigration Commission found
that from 80 to 92 per cent. of the immigrants from northwestern
Europe, resident five years or more in this country, have acquired
citizenship or have taken out first papers. Very different are the
following figures, which show the interest in citizenship of the
newer immigrants:

                 PER CENT.
                NATURALIZED

  Russian Hebrews    57
  Austrians          53
  North Italians     46
  Bulgarians         37
  Poles              33
  Lithuanians        32.5
  South Italians     30
  Russians           28
  Magyars            27
  Slovaks            23
  Rumanians          22
  Syrians            21
  Greeks             20
  Portuguese          5.5

In 1890 and in 1900, 58 per cent. of the qualified foreign-born men
were voters; by 1910 the proportion had fallen to 45.6 per cent. The
presence of multitudes of floating laborers who have no intention of
making this country their home, a marked indifference to citizenship
on the part of some nationalities, and the stiffer requirements
for naturalization imposed under the act of 1906, have caused the
number of non-naturalized qualified foreigners in this country to
swell from approximately 2,000,000 in 1900 to 3,500,000 in 1910. As
things are going, we may expect a great increase in the number of
the unenfranchised. No doubt the country is better off for their not
voting. Nevertheless, let it not be overlooked that this growth in
the proportion of voteless wage-earners subtracts from the natural
political strength of labor. The appeal of labor in an industry like
the cotton manufacture of the North, in which, besides the multitude
of women and children, 70 per cent. of the foreign-born men remain
aliens after five years of residence, is likely to receive scant
consideration by the ordinary legislature. Nor will such labor fare
better at the hands of local authorities. The anti-strike animus of
the police in Lawrence, Little Falls, and Paterson was voiced by
the official who gave to the press the statement: "We have kept the
foreign element in subjection before, and will continue to do so as
long as I am chief of Little Falls' police." Thus, without intending
it, some of our commonwealths are accumulating voteless workers,
like those conservative European states which restrict manhood
suffrage in the industrial classes.


THE NATURALIZED IMMIGRANTS AND THEIR LEADERS

"Come over here quick, Luigi," writes an Italian to his friend
in Palermo. "This is a wonderful country. You can do anything
you want to, and, besides, they give you a vote you can get two
dollars for!" This Italian was an ignorant man, but not necessarily
a bad man. It would not be just to look upon the later naturalized
citizens as caring less for the suffrage than the older immigrants.
Some of them appreciate the ballot all the more from having been
denied it in the old country. For the Declaration of Independence
and the Fourth of July they show a naïve enthusiasm which we
Americans felt a generation ago, before our muck had been raked.
"The spirit of revolt against wrong," says a well-known worker among
immigrants, "is stronger in the foreign-born than in the natives,
because they come here expecting so much democracy, and they are
shocked by the reality they find. It is they who insist upon the
complete program of social justice." Granting all this, there is no
denying, however, that many of the later immigrants have only a dim
understanding of what the ballot means and how it may be used.

[Illustration: Photograph by Lodder

A Civic Banquet to "New Citizens," July 4th]

Thirty years ago we knew as little of the ways of the ward boss
as we knew of the megatherium or the great auk. The sources of
his power were as mysterious as were the sources of the Nile
before Speke and Baker. Now, thanks to Miss Addams and other
settlement-workers who have studied him in action from close at
hand, we have him on a film. The ward boss was the discoverer of
the fact that the ordinary immigrant is a very poor, ignorant, and
helpless man, in the greatest need of assistance and protection.
Nevertheless, this man has, or soon will have, one thing the
politician greatly covets, namely, a vote. The petty politician soon
learned that by befriending and aiding the foreigners at the right
time, he could build up an "influence" which he might use or sell
to his own enrichment. So the ward politicians became pioneers in
social work. For the sake of controlling votes, they did many things
that the social settlement does for nothing.

It is Alderman Tim who gets the Italian a permit for his push-cart
or fruit-stand, who finds him a city-hall job, or a place with
a public-service corporation, who protects him if he violates
law or ordinance in running his business, who goes his bail if
he is arrested, and "fixes things" with the police judge or the
state's attorney when he comes to trial. Even before Giuseppe is
naturalized, it is Tim who remembers him at Christmas with a big
turkey, pays his rent at a pinch, or wins his undying gratitude
by saving his baby from a pauper burial or sending carriages and
flowers to the funeral.

All this kindness and timely aid is prompted by selfish motives.
Amply is Tim repaid by Giuseppe's vote on election day. But at first
Giuseppe misses the secret of the politician's interest in him, and
votes Tim-wise as one shows a favor to a friend. Little does he
dream of the dollar-harvest from the public-service companies and
the vice interests Tim reaps with the "power" he has built up out
of the votes of the foreigners. If, however, Giuseppe starts to be
independent in the election booth, he is startled by the Jekyll-Hyde
transformation of his erstwhile friend and patron. He is menaced
with loss of job, withdrawal of permit or license. Suddenly the
current is turned on in the city ordinances affecting him, and he
is horrified to find himself in a mysterious network of live wires.
With the connivance of a corrupt police force, Tim can even ruin him
on a trumped-up charge.

The law of Pennsylvania allows any voter who demands it to receive
"assistance" in the marking of his ballot. So in Pittsburgh, Tim
expects Giuseppe to demand "assistance" and to take Tim with him
into the booth to mark his ballot for him. Sometimes the election
judges let Tim thrust himself into the booth despite the foreigner's
protests, and watch how he marks his ballot. In one precinct 92 per
cent. of the voters received "assistance." Two Italians who refused
it lost their jobs forthwith. The high-spirited North Italians
resent such intrusion, and some of them threaten to cut to pieces
the interloper. But always the system is too strong for them.

Thus the way of Tim is to allure or to intimidate, or even combine
the two. The immigrant erecting a little store is visited by a
building inspector and warned that his interior arrangements are all
wrong. His friends urge the distracted man to "see Tim." He does so,
and kind Tim "fixes it up," gaining thereby another loyal henchman.
The victim never learns that the inspector was sent to teach him
the need of a protector. So long as the immigrant is "right," he
may put an encroaching bay-window on his house or store, keep open
his saloon after midnight, or pack into his lodging-house more than
the legal number of lodgers. Moved ostensibly by a deep concern for
public health or safety or morals, the city council enacts a great
variety of health, building, and trades ordinances, in order that
Tim may have plenty of clubs to hold over the foreigner's head.

So between boss and immigrant grows up a relation like that between
a feudal lord and his vassals. In return for the boss's help and
protection, the immigrant gives regularly his vote. The small fry
get drinks or jobs, or help in time of trouble. The _padrone_,
liquor-dealer, or lodging-house keeper gets license or permit or
immunity from prosecution, provided he "delivers" the votes of
enough of his fellow-countrymen. The ward boss realizes perfectly
what his political power rests on, and is very conscientious in
looking after his supporters. Of the Irish "gray wolves" in the
Chicago council I was told, "Each of them is a natural ward leader,
and will go through hell-fire for his people and they for him."

To the boss with a hold on the immigrant the requirement that
the poor fellow shall live five years in this country before
voting presents itself as an empty legal formality. In 1905 a
special examiner of the Federal Department of Justice reported:
"Naturalization frauds have grown and spread with the growth and
spread of the alien population of the United States, until there
is scarcely a city or county-seat town ... where in some form
these frauds have not from time to time been committed." In 1845 a
Louisiana judge was impeached and removed for fraud, the principal
evidence being that he had issued certificates to 400 aliens in
one day. The legislature might have been more lenient could it
have foreseen that in 1868 a single judge in New York would issue
2500 of such certificates in one day! The gigantic naturalization
frauds committed in the Presidential campaign of 1868 resulted in
an investigation by Congress and in the placing of congressional
elections under Federal supervision. During the month of October two
New York judges issued 54,000 certificates. An investigation in 1902
showed about 25,000 fraudulent certificates of naturalization in use
in that city.

There is hardly need nowadays to recount what Tim and his kind
have done with the power they filched through the votes of
Giuseppe and Jan and Michael. They have sold out the city to the
franchise-seeking corporations. They have jobbed public works
and pocketed a "rake-off" on all municipal supplies. They have
multiplied jobs and filled them with lazy henchmen. By making
merchandise of building laws or health ordinances, they have caused
an unknown number of people to be crushed, or burned, or poisoned.
Worst of all, by selling immunity from police interference to the
vice interests, they have let the race be preyed on and consumed
in the bud. Thanks to their "protection," a shocking proportion of
the inhabitants of our cities of mixed population are destroyed by
drinking, dissipation, and venereal diseases.

It is in the cities with many naturalized foreigners or enfranchised
<DW64>s that the vice interests have had the freest hand in
exploiting and degrading the people. These foreigners have no love
for vice, but unwittingly they become the corner-stone of the
system that supports it. The city that has had the most and the
rawest foreign-born voters is the city of the longest and closest
partnership of the police with vice. Tammany Hall first gained
power by its "voting gangs" of foreigners, and ever since its Old
Guard has been the ignorant, naturalized immigrants. Exposed again
and again, and thought to be shattered, Tammany has survived all
shocks, _because its supply of raw material has never been cut off_.
Not the loss of its friends has ever defeated it; only the union
of its foes. The only things it fears are those that bore from
within--social settlements, social centers, the quick intelligence
of the immigrant Hebrew, stricter naturalization, and restriction of
immigration.

In every American city with a large pliant foreign vote have
appeared the boss, the machine, and the Tammany way. Once the
machine gets a grip on the situation, it broadens and entrenches its
power by intimidation at the polls, ballot frauds, vote purchase,
saloon influence, and the support of the vicious and criminal. But
its tap-root is the simple-minded foreigner or <DW64>, and without
them no lasting vicious political control has shown itself in any of
our cities.

The machine in power uses the foreigner to keep in power. The
Italian who opens an ice-cream parlor has to have a victualer's
license, and he can keep this license only by delivering Italian
votes. The Polish saloon-keeper loses his liquor license if he
fails to line up his fellow-countrymen for the local machine. The
politician who can get dispensations for the foreigners who want
their beer on a Sunday picnic is the man who attracts the foreign
vote. Thus, until they get their eyes open and see how they are
being used, the foreigners constitute an asset of the established
political machine, neutralizing the anti-machine ballots of an equal
number of indignant intelligent American voters.

The saloon is often an independent swayer of the foreign vote. The
saloon-keeper is interested in fighting all legal regulation of
his own business, and of other businesses--gambling, dance-halls,
and prostitution--which stimulate drinking. If "blue" laws are
on the statute-book, these interests may combine to seat in the
mayor's chair a man pledged not to enforce them. Even if the
saloon-keeper has no political ax of his own to grind, his masters,
the brewers, will insist that he get out the vote for the benefit
of themselves or their friends. Since liberal plying with beer is
a standard means of getting out the foreign vote, the immigrant
saloon-keeper is obliged to become the debaucher and betrayer of his
fellow-countrymen. In Chicago the worthy Germans and Bohemians are
marshaled in the "United Societies," ostensibly social organizations
along nationality lines, but really the machinery through which
the brewers and liquor-dealers may sway the foreign-born vote not
only in defense of liquor, but also in defense of other corrupt and
affiliated interests.

The foreign press is another means of misleading the naturalized
voters. These newspapers--Polish, Bohemian, Italian, Greek, Yiddish,
etc.,--while they have no small influence with their readers, are
poorly supported, and often in financial straits. Many of them,
therefore, can be tempted to sell their political influence to
the highest bidder, which is, of course, the party representing
the special interests. Thus the innocent foreign-born readers
are led like sheep to the shambles, and Privilege gains another
intrenching-tool.


THE LOSS OF POLITICAL LIKE-MINDEDNESS

If the immigrant is neither debauched nor misled, but votes his
opinions, is he then an element of strength to us?

When a people has reached such a degree of political
like-mindedness, that fundamentals are taken for granted, it is
free to tackle new questions as they come up. But if it admits to
citizenship myriads of strangers who have not yet passed the
civic kindergarten, questions that were supposed to be settled are
reopened. The citizens are made to thresh over again old straw--the
relation of church to state, of church to school, of state to
parent, of law to the liquor trade. Meanwhile, ripe sheaves ready
to yield the wheat of wisdom under the flails of discussion lie
untouched. Pressing questions--public hygiene, conservation, the
control of monopoly, the protection of labor, go to the foot of the
docket, and public interests suffer.

[Illustration: Y. M. C. A. Class of Slovenes in English Visiting a
Session of the City Council of Cleveland]

[Illustration: Class of Foreign-Born Women (Carinthians) at the
Cleveland Hardware Co., Cleveland, O., Meeting for Instruction in
English in the Factory, Twice a Week from 5 to 6:30]

Some are quite cheerful about the confusion, cross-purposes, and
delay that come with heterogeneity, because they think the variety
of views introduced by immigration is a fine thing, "keeps us
from getting into a rut." The plain truth is, that rarely does
an immigrant bring in his intellectual baggage anything of use
to us. The music of Mascagni and Debussy, the plays of Ibsen and
Maeterlinck, the poetry of Rostand and Hauptmann, the fiction of
Jókai and Sienkiewicz were not brought to us by way of Ellis Island.
What we want is not ideas merely, but fruitful ideas, fructifying
ideas. By debating the ideas of Nietzsche, Ostwald, Bergson,
Metchnikoff, or Ellen Key, American thought is stimulated. But
should we gain from the introduction of old Asiatic points of view,
which would reopen such questions as witchcraft, child-marriage,
and suttee? The clashings that arise from the presence among us
of many voters with medieval minds are sheer waste of energy.
While we Americans wrangle over the old issues of clericalism,
separate schools, and "personal liberty," the little homogeneous
peoples--Norwegians and Danes and New Zealanders--are forging ahead
of us in rational politics and learning to look pityingly upon us as
a chaos rather than a people.


POLITICAL MYSTICISM VS. COMMON SENSE

If you should ask an Englishman whether the tone of political
life in his country would remain unaffected by the admission to
the electorate of a couple of million Cypriotes, Vlachs, and
Bessarabians after five years' residence, he would take you for
a madman. Suggest to the German that the plane of political
intelligence in reading and thinking Germany would not be lowered
by the access to the ballot-box of multitudes of Serbs, Georgians,
and Druses of Lebanon, and he will consign you to bedlam. Assure the
son of Norway that the vote of the Persian or Yemenite, of sixty
months' residence in Norway, will be as often wise and right as his
own, and he will be insulted. It is only we Americans who assume
that the voting of the Middle Atlantic States, with their million
of naturalized citizens, or of the East North Central States, with
_their_ million, is as sane, discriminating, and forward-looking as
it would be without them.

The Italian historian and sociologist Ferrero, after reviewing our
immigration policy, concludes that the Americans, far from being
"practical," are really the mystics of the modern world. He says:
"To confer citizenship each year upon great numbers of men born
and educated in foreign countries--men who come with ideas and
sympathies totally out of spirit with the diverse conditions in the
new country; to grant them political rights they do not want, and of
which they have never thought; to compel them to declare allegiance
to a political constitution which they often do not understand;
to try to transform subjects of old European monarchies into free
citizens of young American republics over night--is not all this to
do violence to common sense?"




CHAPTER XII

AMERICAN BLOOD AND IMMIGRANT BLOOD


As I sought to show, near the end of my initial chapter, the
conditions of settlement of this country caused those of uncommon
energy and venturesomeness to outmultiply the rest of the
population. Thus came into existence the pioneering breed; and this
breed increased until it is safe to estimate that fully half of
white Americans with native grandparents have one or more pioneers
among their ancestors. Whatever valuable race traits distinguish
the American people from the parent European stocks are due to
the efflorescence of this breed. Without it there would have been
little in the performance of our people to arrest the attention
of the world. Now we confront the melancholy spectacle of this
pioneer breed being swamped and submerged by an overwhelming tide
of latecomers from the old-world hive. In Atlanta still seven out
of eight white men had American parents; in Nashville and Richmond,
four out of five; in Kansas City, two out of three; and in Los
Angeles, one out of two; but in Detroit, Cleveland, and Paterson one
man out of five had American parents; in Chicago and New York, one
out of six; in Milwaukee, one out of seven; and in Fall River,
one out of nine. _Certainly never since the colonial era have the
foreign-born and their children formed so large a proportion of the
American people as at the present moment._ I scanned 368 persons
as they passed me in Union Square, New York, at a time when the
garment-workers of the Fifth Avenue lofts were returning to their
homes. Only thirty-eight of these passers-by had the type of face
one would find at a county fair in the West or South.

[Illustration: The Distribution of Foreign Stock in the United
States--1910]

In the six or seven hundred thousand strangers that yearly join
themselves to us for good and all, there are to be found, of course,
every talent and every beauty. Out of the steerage come persons as
fine and noble as any who have trodden American soil. Any adverse
characterization of an immigrant stream implies, then, only that the
trait is relatively frequent, not that it is universal.

In this sense it is fair to say that the blood now being injected
into the veins of our people is "sub-common." To one accustomed
to the aspect of the normal American population, the Caliban type
shows up with a frequency that is startling. Observe immigrants
not as they come travel-wan up the gang-plank, nor as they
issue toil-begrimed from pit's mouth or mill gate, but in their
gatherings, washed, combed, and in their Sunday best. You are
struck by the fact that from ten to twenty per cent. are hirsute,
low-browed, big-faced persons of obviously low mentality. Not that
they suggest evil. They simply look out of place in black clothes
and stiff collar, since clearly they belong in skins, in wattled
huts at the close of the Great Ice Age. These oxlike men are
descendants of those _who always stayed behind_. Those in whom the
soul burns with the dull, smoky flame of the pine-knot stuck to the
soil, and are now thick in the sluiceways of immigration. Those in
whom it burns with a clear, luminous flame have been attracted to
the cities of the home land and, having prospects, have no motive to
submit themselves to the hardships of the steerage.

To the practised eye, the physiognomy of certain groups unmistakably
proclaims inferiority of type. I have seen gatherings of the
foreign-born in which narrow and sloping foreheads were the rule.
The shortness and smallness of the crania were very noticeable.
There was much facial asymmetry. Among the women, beauty, aside
from the fleeting, epidermal bloom of girlhood, was quite lacking.
In every face there was something wrong--lips thick, mouth coarse,
upper lip too long, cheek-bones too high, chin poorly formed, the
bridge of the nose hollowed, the base of the nose tilted, or else
the whole face prognathous. There were so many sugar-loaf heads,
moon-faces, slit mouths, lantern-jaws, and goose-bill noses that one
might imagine a malicious jinn had amused himself by casting human
beings in a set of skew-molds discarded by the Creator.

Our captains of industry give a crowbar to the immigrant with a
number nine face on a number six head, make a dividend out of him,
and imagine that is the end of the matter. They overlook that this
man will beget children in his image--two or three times as many as
the American--and that these children will in turn beget children.
They chuckle at having opened an inexhaustible store of cheap tools
and, lo! the American people is being altered for all time by these
tools. Once before, captains of industry took a hand in making this
people. Colonial planters imported Africans to hoe in the sun,
to "develop" the tobacco, indigo, and rice plantations. Then, as
now, business-minded men met with contempt the protests of a few
idealists against their way of "building up the country."

Those promoters of prosperity are dust, but they bequeathed a
situation which in four years wiped out more wealth than two hundred
years of slavery had built up, and which presents to-day the one
unsolvable problem in this country. Without likening immigrants to
<DW64>s, one may point out how the latter-day employer resembles the
old-time planter in his blindness to the effects of his labor policy
upon the blood of the nation.


IMMIGRATION AND GOOD LOOKS

It is reasonable to expect an early falling off in the frequency of
good looks in the American people. It is unthinkable that so many
persons with crooked faces, coarse mouths, bad noses, heavy jaws,
and low foreheads can mingle their heredity with ours without making
personal beauty yet more rare among us than it actually is. So
much ugliness is at last bound to work to the surface. One ought to
see the horror on the face of a fine-looking Italian or Hungarian
consul when one asks him innocently, "Is the physiognomy of these
immigrants typical of your people?" That the new immigrants are
inferior in looks to the old immigrants may be seen by comparing,
in a Labor Day parade, the faces of the cigar-makers and the
garment-workers with those of the teamsters, piano-movers and
steam-fitters.

Even aside from the pouring in of the ill-favored, the crossing
of the heterogeneous is bound to lessen good looks among us.
It is noteworthy that the beauty which has often excited the
admiration of European visitors has shown itself most in
communities of comparative purity of blood. New England, Virginia,
and Kentucky have been renowned for their beautiful women, but
not the commonwealths with a mixed population. It is in the
less-heterogeneous parts of the Middle West, such as Indiana and
Kansas, that one is struck by the number of comely women.

Twenty-four years ago the greatest living philosopher advised
inquiring Japanese statesmen to interdict marriages of Japanese
with foreigners, on the ground that the crossings of the too-unlike
produce human beings with a "chaotic constitution." Herbert Spencer
went on to say, "When the varieties mingled diverge beyond a certain
slight degree, the result is inevitably a bad one." The greatest
students of hybridism to-day confirm Spencer's surmise. The fusing
of American with German and Scandinavian immigrants was only a
reblending of kindred stocks, for Angles, Jutes, Danes, and Normans
were wrought of yore into the fiber of the English breed. But the
human varieties being collected in this country by the naked action
of economic forces are too dissimilar to blend without producing
a good many faces of a "chaotic constitution." Just as there is a
wide difference in looks between Bretons and Normans, Dutch and
Hanoverians, the Chinese of Hu-peh and the Chinese of Fukien,
so broad contrasts in good looks may in time appear between the
pure-blood parts of our country and those which have absorbed a
motley assortment of immigrants.


STATURE AND PHYSIQUE

Although the Slavs stand up well, our South Europeans run to low
stature. A gang of Italian navvies filing along the street present,
by their dwarfishness, a curious contrast to other people. The
Portuguese, the Greeks, and the Syrians are, from our point of view,
undersized. The Hebrew immigrants are very poor in physique. The
average of Hebrew women in New York is just over five feet, and
the young women in the garment factories, although well developed,
appear to be no taller than native girls of thirteen.

On the physical side the Hebrews are the polar opposite of our
pioneer breed. Not only are they undersized and weak-muscled, but
they shun bodily activity and are exceedingly sensitive to pain.
Says a settlement worker: "You can't make boy scouts out of the
Jews. There's not a troop of them in all New York." Another remarks:
"They are absolute babies about pain. Their young fellows will
scream with a hard lick." Students observe that husky young Hebrews
on the foot-ball team lack grit, and will "take on" if they are
bumped into hard. A young Ontario miner noticed that his Hebrew
comrades groaned and wept over the hardships of the trail. "They
kept swapping packs with me, imagining my pack must be lighter
because I wasn't hollering."

Natural selection, frontier life, and the example of the red man
produced in America a type of great physical self-control, gritty,
uncomplaining, merciless to the body through fear of becoming
"soft." To this roaming, hunting, exploring, adventurous breed
what greater contrast is there than the denizens of the Ghetto?
The second generation, to be sure, overtop their parents and are
going in for athletics. Hebrews under Irish names abound in the
prize-ring, and not long ago a sporting editor printed the item,
"Jack Sullivan received a letter in Yiddish yesterday from his
sister." Still, it will be long before they produce the stoical type
who blithely fares forth into the wilderness, portaging his canoe,
poling it against the current, wading in the torrents, living on
bacon and beans, and sleeping on the ground, all for "fun" or "to
keep hard."


VITALITY

"The Slavs," remarks a physician, "are immune to certain kinds of
dirt. They can stand what would kill a white man." The women do not
have puerperal fever, as our women would under their conditions.
The men violate every sanitary law, yet survive. The Slavs come
from a part of the world in which never more than a third of the
children have grown up. In every generation, dirt, ignorance,
superstition, and lack of medical attention have winnowed out all
but the sturdiest. Among Americans, two-thirds of the children grow
up, which means that we keep alive many of the tenderer, who would
certainly have perished in the Slavic world. There is, however, no
illusion more grotesque than to suppose that our people is to be
rejuvenated by absorbing these millions of hardy peasantry, that,
to quote a champion of free immigration, "The new-comers in America
will bring fresh, vigorous blood to a rather sterile and inbred
stock." The fact is that the immigrant stock quickly loses here its
distinctive ruggedness. The physicians practising among rural Poles
notice a great saving of infant life under American conditions. Says
one: "I see immigrant women and their grown daughters having infants
at the same time, and the children of the former will die of the
things that the children of the latter get well of. The same holds
when the second generation and the third bear at the same time. The
latter save their children better than the former." The result is
a marked softening of fiber between the immigrant women and the
granddaughters. Among the latter are many of a finer, but frailer,
mold, who would be ruined in health if they worked in the field the
third day after confinement, as grandmother did. In the old country
there were very few of this type who survived infancy in a peasant
family.

There is, then, no lasting revitalization from this tide of life.
If our people has become weak, no transfusion of peasants will
set it on its feet again; for their blood too, soon thins. The
trouble, if you call it that, is not with the American people, but
with the wide diffusion among us of a civilized manner of life.
Where the struggle for existence is mitigated not merely for the
upper quarter of society, as formerly in the Old World, but for the
upper three-quarters, as in this and other democratic countries,
the effects of keeping alive the less hardy are bound to show. The
remedy for the alleged degeneration of our stock is simple, but
drastic. If we want only constitutions that can stand hardship
and abuse, let us treat the young as they are treated in certain
poverty-stricken parts of Russia. Since the mother is obliged to
pass the day at work in distant fields, the nursling of a few months
is left alone, crawling about on the dirt floor of the hut and
comforting itself, when it cries from hunger, by sucking poultices
of chewed bread tied to its hands and feet.


MORALITY

That the Mediterranean peoples are morally below the races of
northern Europe is as certain as any social fact. Even when they
were dirty, ferocious barbarians, these blonds were truth-tellers.
Be it pride or awkwardness or lack of imagination or fair-play
sense, something has held them back from the nimble lying of the
southern races. Immigration officials find that the different
peoples are as day and night in point of veracity, and report vast
trouble in extracting the truth from certain brunet nationalities.

Some champions of immigration have become broad-minded enough
to think small of the cardinal virtues. The Syrians, on Boston
testimony, took "great pains to cheat the charitable societies"
and are "extremely untrustworthy and unreliable." Their defender,
however, after admitting their untruthfulness, explains that their
lying is altruistic. If, at the fork of a road, you ask a Syrian
your way, he will, in sheer transport of sympathy, study you to
discover what answer will most please you. "The Anglo-Saxon variety
of truthfulness," she adds, "is not a Syrian characteristic"; but,
"if truthfulness includes loyalty, ready self-denial to promote a
cause that seems right, the Syrian is to that extent truthful."
Quoting a Syrian's admission that his fellow-merchants pay their
debts for their credit's sake, but will cheat the customer, she
comments, "This, however, does not seem to be exclusively a Syrian
vice." To such miserable paltering does a sickly sentimentality lead.

       *       *       *       *       *

In southern Europe, team-work along all lines is limited by
selfishness and bad faith. Professor Fairchild notes "the inveterate
factionalism and commercial dishonesty so characteristic of the
[Greek] race," "the old dishonesty and inability to work together."
"One of the maxims of Greek business life, translated into the
American vernacular, is 'Put out the other fellow's eye.'" "These
people seemed incapable of carying on a large coöperative business
with harmony and success."

Nothing less than verminous is the readiness of the southern
Europeans to prey upon their fellows. Never were British or
Scandinavian immigrants so bled by fellow-countrymen as are South
Italian, Greek and Semitic immigrants. Their spirit of mutual
helpfulness saved them from _padrone_, "banker," and Black Hand.
Among our South Italians this spirit shines out only when it is
a question of shielding from American justice some cut-throat of
their own race. The Greek is full of tricks to skin the greenhorn.
A grocer will warn fellow-countrymen who have just established
themselves in his town that he will have the police on them for
violating municipal ordinances unless they buy groceries from him.
The Greek mill-hand sells the greenhorn a job, and takes his chances
on the foreman giving the man work. A Greek who knows a little
English will get a Greek peddler arrested in order that he may get
the interpreter's fee. The Greek boot-black who has freed himself
from his serfdom, instead of showing up the system, starts a place
of his own, and exploits his help as mercilessly as ever he was
exploited.

The Northerners seem to surpass the southern Europeans in innate
ethical endowment. Comparison of their behavior in marine disasters
shows that discipline, sense of duty, presence of mind, and
consideration for the weak are much more characteristic of northern
Europeans. The southern Europeans, on the other hand, are apt,
in their terror, to forget discipline, duty, women, children,
everything but the saving of their own lives. In shipwreck it is the
exceptional Northerner who forgets his duty, and the exceptional
Southerner who is bound by it. The suicide of Italian officers on
board the doomed _Monte Tabor_, the _Notice_, and the _Ajace_, is in
striking contrast to the sense of responsibility of the Northerners
in charge of the _Cimbria_, the _Geiser_, the _Strathcona_, and
the _City of Paris_. Compare the mad struggle for the boats among
the southern Europeans on _La Bourgogne_, the _Ailsa_, and the
_Utopia_, with the self-possession of the Scandinavian emigrants on
the _Waesland_ and the _Danmark_, and the consideration for women
and children shown on the sinking _Mohegan_, the _Waesland_, and the
_Titanic_. Among all nationalities the Americans bear the palm for
coolness, orderly saving of life, and consideration for the weak in
shipwreck, but they will lose these traits in proportion as they
absorb excitable mercurial blood from southern Europe.


NATURAL ABILITY

The performance of the foreign-born and their children after they
have had access to American opportunities justifies the democrat's
faith that latent capacity exists all through the humbler strata
of society. On the other hand, it also confirms the aristocrat's
insistence that social ranks correspond somewhat with the grades
of natural ability existing within a people. The descendants of
Europe's lowly are to be met in all the upper levels of American
society, _but not so frequently_ as the descendents of those who
were high or rising in the land they left.

In respect to the value it contains, a stream of immigrants may be
_representative_, _super-representative_, or _sub-representative_ of
the home people. When it is a fair sample, it is _representative_;
when it is richer in wheat and poorer in chaff, it is _super-
representative_; when the reverse is the case, it is _sub-
representative_. What counts here, of course, is not the value
the immigrants may have acquired by education or experience, but
that fundamental worth which does not depend on opportunity, and
which may be transmitted to one's descendants. Now, in the present
state of our knowledge, it is perhaps risky to make a comparison in
ability between the races which contributed the old immigration and
those which are supplying the new immigration. Though backward, the
latter may contain as good stuff. But it is fair to assume that a
_super-representative_ immigration from one stock is worth more to
us than a _sub-representative_ immigration from another stock, and
that an influx which sub-represents a European people will thin the
blood of the American people.

Many things have decided whether Europe should send America cream
or skimmed milk. Religious or political oppression is apt to drive
out the better elements. Racial oppression cannot be evaded by
mere conformity; hence the emigration it sets up is apt to be
representative. An unsubdued and perilous land attracts the more
bold and enterprising. The seekers of homesteads include men of
better stuff than the job-seekers attracted by high wages for
unskilled labor. Only economic motives set in motion the sub-common
people, but even in an economic emigration the early stage brings
more people of initiative than the later. The deeper, straighter,
and smoother the channels of migration, the lower the stratum they
can tap.

It is not easy to value the early elements that were wrought into
the American people. Often a stream of immigration that started with
the best drained from the lower levels after it had worn itself a
bed. It is therefore only in a broad way that I venture to classify
the principal colonial migrations as follows:

_Super-representative_: English Pilgrims, Puritans, Quakers,
Catholics, Scotch Covenanters, French Huguenots, German sectaries.

_Representative_: English of Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas,
Scotch-Irish, Scotch Highlanders, Dutch, and Swedes.

_Sub-representative_: English of early Georgia, transported English,
eighteenth-century Germans.

In our national period the Germans of 1848 stand out as
a _super-representative_ flow. The Irish stream has been
_representative_, as was also the early German migration. The
German inflow since 1870 has brought us very few of the élite of
their people, and I have already given reasons for believing that
the Scandinavian stream is not altogether _representative_. Our
immigration from Great Britain has distinctly fallen off in grade
since the chances in America came to be less attractive than those
in the British Empire. However, no less an authority than Sir
Richard Cartwright thinks that "between 1866 and 1896 one-third
at least of the whole male population of Canada between the ages
of twenty and forty found their way to the United States," and
this "included an immense percentage of the most intelligent and
adventurous." To-day we reciprocate by sending Western farmers with
capital into the Canadian Northwest. Our loss has amounted to as
many as 100,000 in a single year.

Oppression is now out of fashion over most of Europe, and our public
lands are gone. Economic motives more and more bring us immigrants,
and such motives will not uproot the educated, the propertied,
the established, the well connected. The children of success are
not migrating, which means that we get few scions from families
of proved capacity. Europe retains most of her brains, but sends
multitudes of the common and the sub-common. There is little sign of
an intellectual element among the Magyars, Russians, South Slavs,
Italians, Greeks, or Portuguese. This does not hold, however, for
currents created by race discrimination or oppression. The Armenian,
Syrian, Finnish, and Russo-Hebrew streams seem _representative_,
and the first wave of Hebrews out of Russia in the eighties was
superior. The Slovaks, German Poles, Lithuanians, Esthonians, and
other restive subject groups probably send us a fair sample of their
quality.


RACE SUICIDE

The fewer brains they have to contribute, the lower the place
immigrants take among us, and the lower the place they take,
the faster they multiply. In 1890, in our cities, a thousand
foreign-born women could show 565 children under five years of
age to 309 children shown by a thousand native women. By 1900 the
contribution of the foreign women had risen to 612, and that of
the American women had declined to 296. From such figures some
argue that the "sterile" Americans need the immigrants in order
to supply population. It would be nearer the truth to argue that
the competition of low-standard immigrants is the root cause of
the mysterious "sterility" of Americans. Certainly their record
down to 1830 proved the Americans to be as fertile a race as ever
lived, and the decline in their fertility coincides in time and in
locality with the advent of the immigrant flood. In the words of
General Francis A. Walker, "Not only did the decline in the native
element, as a whole, take place in singular correspondence with
the excess of foreign arrivals, but it occurred chiefly in just
those regions"--"in those States and in the very counties," he says
elsewhere--"to which those newcomers most frequently resorted."

"Our immigrants," says a superintendent of charities, "often come
here with no standards whatever. In their homes you find no sheets
on the bed, no slips on the pillows, no cloth on the table, and no
towels save old rags. Even in the mud-floor cabins of the poorest
<DW64>s of the South you find sheets, pillow-slips, and towels, for
by serving and associating with the whites the blacks have gained
standards. But many of the foreigners have no means of getting our
home standards after they are here. No one shows them. They can't
see into American homes, and no Americans associate with them." The
Americans or Americanized immigrants who are obliged to live on
wages fixed by the competition of such people must cut somewhere. If
they do not choose to "live in a pig-pen and bring up one's children
like pigs," they will save their standards by keeping down the
size of the family. Because he keeps them clean, neatly dressed, and
in school, children are an economic burden to the American. Because
he lets them run wild and puts them to work early, children are an
asset to the low-standard foreigner.

[Illustration: Distribution of Native White Stock in the United
States--1910]

When a more-developed element is obliged to compete on the same
economic plane with a less-developed element, the standards of
cleanliness or decency or education cherished by the advanced
element act on it like a slow poison. William does not leave as
many children as 'Tonio, because he will not huddle his family into
one room, eat macaroni off a bare board, work his wife barefoot
in the field, and keep his children weeding onions instead of at
school. Even moral standards may act as poison. Once the women
raisin-packers at Fresno, California, were American-born. Now
the American women are leaving because of the low moral tone
that prevails in the working force by reason of the coming in of
foreigners with lax notions of propriety. The coarseness of speech
and behavior among the packers is giving raisin-packing a bad name,
so that American women are quitting the work and taking the next
best job. Thus the very decency of the native is a handicap to
success and to fecundity.

As they feel the difficulty of keeping up their standards on a Slav
wage, the older immigrant stocks are becoming sterile, even as the
old Americans became sterile. In a generation complaint will be
heard that the Slavs, too, are shirking big families, and that we
must admit prolific Persians, Uzbegs, and Bokhariots, in order to
offset the fatal sterility that attacks every race after it has
become Americanized. Very truly says a distinguished economist, in
praise of immigration: "The cost of rearing children in the United
States is rapidly rising. In many, perhaps in most cases, it is
simpler, speedier, and cheaper to import labor than to breed it." In
like vein it is said that "a healthy immigrant lad of eighteen is a
clear $1000 added to the national wealth of the United States."

Just so. "The Roman world was laughing when it died." Any couple or
any people that does not feel it has anything to transmit to its
children may well reason in such fashion. A couple may reflect,
"It is simpler, speedier, and cheaper for us to adopt orphans than
to produce children of our own." A nation may reason, "Why burden
ourselves with the rearing of children? Let them perish unborn in
the womb of time. The immigrants will keep up the population." A
people that has no more respect for its ancestors and no more pride
of race than this deserves the extinction that surely awaits it.




APPENDIX




APPENDIX


TABLE I

ANNUAL IMMIGRATION 1820-1913

  Year ending Sept. 30
    1820                  8,385
    1821                  9,127
    1822                  6,911
    1823                  6,354
    1824                  7,912
    1825                 10,199
    1826                 10,837

  Year ending Sept. 30
    1827                 18,875
    1828                 27,382
    1829                 22,520
    1830                 23,322
    1831                 22,633

  15 months ending Dec. 31
    1832                 60,482

  Year ending Dec. 31
    1833                 58,640
    1834                 65,365
    1835                 45,374
    1836                 76,242
    1837                 79,340
    1838                 38,914
    1839                 68,069
    1840                 84,066
    1841                 80,289
    1842                104,565

  9 months ending Sept. 30
    1843                 52,496

  Year ending Sept. 30
    1844                 78,615
    1845                114,371
    1846                154,416
    1847                234,968
    1848                226,527
    1849                297,024
    1850                310,004

  3 months ending Dec. 31
    1850                 59,976

  Year ending Dec. 31
    1851                379,466
    1852                371,603
    1853                368,645
    1854                427,833
    1855                200,877
    1856                200,436
    1857                251,306
    1858                123,126
    1859                121,282
    1860                153,640
    1861                 91,918
    1862                 91,985
    1863                176,282
    1864                193,418
    1865                248,120
    1866                318,568
    1867                315,722

  6 months ending June 30
    1868                138,840

  Year ending June 30
    1869                352,768
    1870                387,203
    1871                321,350
    1872                404,806
    1873                459,803
    1874                313,339
    1875                227,498
    1876                169,986
    1877                141,857
    1878                138,469
    1879                177,826
    1880                457,257
    1881                669,431
    1882                788,992
    1883                603,322
    1884                518,592
    1885                395,346
    1886                334,203
    1887                490,109
    1888                546,889
    1889                444,427
    1890                455,302
    1891                560,319
    1892                623,084
    1893                439,730
    1894                285,631
    1895                258,536
    1896                343,267
    1897                230,832
    1898                229,299
    1899                311,715
    1900                448,572
    1901                487,918
    1902                648,743
    1903                857,046
    1904                812,870
    1905              1,026,499
    1906              1,100,735
    1907              1,285,349
    1908                782,870
    1909                751,786
    1910              1,041,570
    1911                878,587
    1912                838,172
    1913              1,197,892
    1914 (11 months)  1,254,548


TABLE II

TOTAL NUMBER OF IMMIGRANTS, BY DECADES

  1821-1830      143,439
  1831-1840      599,125
  1841-1850    1,713,251
  1851-1860    2,598,214
  1861-1870    2,314,824
  1871-1880    2,812,191
  1881-1890    5,246,613
  1891-1900    3,687,564
  1901-1910    8,795,386


TABLE III

INCREASE OF FOREIGN-BORN IN POPULATION BY DECADES

                Population.    Increase.  Increase.
  CENSUS YEAR.  Foreign-Born              Percentage
      1850        2,244,602
      1860        4,138,697    1,894,095    84.4
      1870        5,567,229    1,428,532    34.5
      1880        6,679,943    1,112,714    20.0
      1890        9,249,560    2,569,617    38.5
      1900       10,341,276    1,091,716    11.8
      1910       13,343,583    3,129,766    30.6


TABLE IV

FOREIGN-BORN IN UNITED STATES IN 1910
                                                     Per cent
    COUNTRY OF BIRTH.                    Number.     of total.
  Total foreign born.                  13,515,886      100.0

                                       ==========      =====

     Europe                            11,791,841       87.2
    _Northwestern Europe_               6,740,400       49.9
  Great Britain                         1,221,283        9.0
    England                               877,719        6.5
    Scotland                              261,076        1.9
    Wales                                  82,488        0.6
  Ireland                               1,352,251       10.0
  Germany                               2,501,333       18.5
  Scandinavian countries                1,250,733        9.3
    Norway                                403,877        3.0
    Sweden                                665,207        1.9
    Denmark                               181,649        1.3
  Netherlands (Holland), Belgium,
    and Luxemburg                         172,534        1.3
    Netherlands                           120,063        0.9
    Belgium                                49,400        0.4
    Luxemburg                               3,071
  France                                  117,418        0.9
  Switzerland                             124,848        0.9
    _Southern and Eastern Europe_       5,048,583       37.4
  Portugal                                 59,360        0.4
  Spain                                    22,108        0.2
  Italy                                 1,343,125        9.9
  Russia and Finland                    1,732,462       12.8
    Russia                              1,602,782       11.9
    Finland                               129,680        1.0

                                        Per cent
    COUNTRY OF BIRTH.         Number.   of total.

  Austria-Hungary            1,670,582    12.4
    Austria                  1,174,973     8.7
    Hungary                    495,609     3.7
  Balkan peninsula             220,946     1.6
    Roumania                    65,923     0.5
    Bulgaria                    11,498     0.1
    Servia                       4,639
    Montenegro                   5,374
    Greece                     101,282     0.7
    Turkey in Europe            32,230     0.2
  Country not specified          2,858

    Asia                       191,484     1.4
                             ---------
  China                         56,756     0.4
  Japan                         67,744     0.5
  India                          4,664
  Turkey in Asia                59,729     0.4
  All other countries            2,591

    America                  1,489,231    11.0
                             ---------
  Canada and Newfoundland    1,209,717     9.0
    Canada--French             385,083     2.8
    Canada--Other              819,554     6.1
    Newfoundland                 5,080
  West Indies                   47,635     0.4
  Mexico                       221,915     1.6
  Central and South America      9,964     0.1
    All other                   43,330     0.3

[Illustration: COUNTRY OF ORIGIN

FOREIGN-BORN POPULATION, BY PRINCIPAL COUNTRIES OF BIRTH: 1910 AND
1900

  GERMANY                  18.5
  RUSSIA AND FINLAND       12.8
  AUSTRIA HUNGARY          12.4
  IRELAND                  10.0
  ITALY                     9.9
  NORWAY                 }
  SWEDEN                 }  9.3
  DENMARK                }
  GREAT BRITAIN             9.0
  CANADA AND NEWFOUNDLAND   9.0
  ALL OTHER                 9.1

TOTAL FOREIGN BORN, 1910: 13,515,886

  GERMANY                  27.2
  IRELAND                  15.6
  CANADA AND NEWFOUNDLAND  11.4
  GREAT BRITAIN            11.3
  NORWAY                 }
  SWEDEN                 } 10.4
  DENMARK                }
  AUSTRIA HUNGARY           6.2
  RUSSIA AND FINLAND        6.2
  ITALY                     4.7
  ALL OTHER                 7.0

TOTAL FOREIGN BORN, 1900: 10,341,276]


TABLE V

PER CENT. OF IMMIGRANTS FROM NORTHERN AND WESTERN EUROPE AND FROM
SOUTHERN AND EASTERN EUROPE, 1820 TO 1910

               Northern  Southern    Total     Other
                 and       and       from    specified
    PERIOD.    Western.  Eastern.   Europe.  countries.

  1820-1830      87.0       2.9      89.9      10.1
  1831-1840      92.5       1.1      93.7       6.3
  1841-1850      95.9        .3      96.2       3.8
  1851-1860      94.6        .8      95.5       4.5
  1861-1870      88.5       1.5      89.9      10.1
  1871-1880      73.7       7.1      80.8      19.2
  1881-1890      72.0      18.3      90.3       9.7
  1891-1900      44.8      52.8      97.5       2.5
  1901-1910      21.8      71.9      93.7       6.3


TABLE VI

OLD AND NEW IMMIGRATION COMPARED WITH RESPECT TO ABILITY OF THE
FOREIGN-BORN TO READ, BY RACE[1] (STUDY OF EMPLOYEES)

  [1] Vol. I, p. 443. Abstracts of Reports of the Immigration
  Commission.

                       Per
                      cent.
                      able
                       to
    OLD IMMIGRATION.  read.

  Canadian, French    88.1
  Canadian, other     98.9
  Dutch               97.6
  English             98.8
  German              98.0

                       Per
                      cent.
                      able
                       to
    NEW IMMIGRATION.  read.

  Bulgarian           78.1
  Croatian            70.9
  Greek               80.5
  Hebrew, Russian     93.1
  Hebrew, other       92.5

                       Per
                      cent.
                      able
                       to
    OLD IMMIGRATION.  read.

  Irish               95.8
  Scotch              99.5
  Swedish             99.8
  Welsh               98.1

                       Per
                      cent.
                      able
                       to
    NEW IMMIGRATION.  read.

  Italian, North      83.3
  Italian, South      67.5
  Lithuanian          77.3
  Magyar              91.0
  Polish              79.9
  Portuguese          47.5
  Roumanian           82.6
  Russian             74.5
  Ruthenian           65.8
  Servian             71.3
  Slovak              84.4
  Slovenian           87.5
  Spanish             98.1
  Syrian              63.6


TABLE VII

OLD AND NEW IMMIGRATION COMPARED WITH RESPECT TO FOREIGN-BORN
HUSBANDS REPORTING WIFE ABROAD, BY RACE.[2] (STUDY OF EMPLOYEES)

  [2] Vol. I, p. 460. Abstracts of Reports of the Immigration
  Commission.

                     Per cent
                     Reporting
                       Wife
    OLD IMMIGRATION.  Abroad.

  Canadian, French      1.5
  Dutch                 3.8
  English               3.4

                     Per cent
                     Reporting
                       Wife
    NEW IMMIGRATION.  Abroad.

  Bulgarian            90.0
  Croatian             59.3
  Greek                74.7

                     Per cent
                     Reporting
                       Wife
    OLD IMMIGRATION.  Abroad.

  German                4.3
  Irish                 1.2
  Scotch                3.2
  Swedish               2.9
  Welsh                 1.4

                     Per cent
                     Reporting
                       Wife
    NEW IMMIGRATION.  Abroad.

  Hebrew, Russian      12.5
  Italian, North       31.6
  Italian, South       36.9
  Lithuanian           23.3
  Magyar               43.3
  Polish               23.0
  Portuguese           15.9
  Roumanian            73.9
  Russian              45.5
  Servian              64.5
  Slovak               34.2
  Slovenian            33.7


TABLE VIII

OLD AND NEW IMMIGRATION COMPARED WITH RESPECT TO ABILITY TO SPEAK
ENGLISH.[3] (STUDY OF EMPLOYEES)

  [3] Vol. I, p. 477. Abstracts of Reports of the Immigration
  Commission.

      OLD IMMIGRATION.
    Nationality.  Per cent.

  Danish            96.5
  Dutch             86.1
  French            68.6
  German            87.5
  Norwegian         96.9
  Swedish           94.7
                    ----
    Average         82.2

      NEW IMMIGRATION.
    Nationality.  Per cent.

  Bulgarian         20.3
  Croatian          50.9
  Greek             33.5
  South Italian     48.7
  Lithuanian        51.3
  Macedonian        21.1
  Magyar            46.4
  Montenegrin       38.0
  Polish            43.5

    OLD IMMIGRATION.
  Nationality.  Per cent.

      NEW IMMIGRATION.
    Nationality.  Per cent.

  Roumanian         33.3
  Ruthenian         36.8
  Russian           43.6
  Servian           41.2
  Slovak            55.6
  Slovenian         51.7
  Syrian            54.6
  Turkish           22.5
                    ----
    Average         40.8


TABLE IX

FOREIGN-BORN IN URBAN AND RURAL COMMUNITIES, 1910

        OLD IMMIGRATION.

                     Per     Per
  Country            Cent    Cent
  of Birth.         Urban.  Rural.

  Belgium            59.6    40.4
  Denmark            48.3    51.7
  England            72.6    27.4
  France             69.9    30.1
  Germany            66.7    33.3
  Holland            54.9    45.1
  Ireland            84.7    15.3
  Norway             42.2    57.8
  Scotland           72.4    27.6
  Sweden             60.6    39.4
  Switzerland        53.9    46.1

          NEW IMMIGRATION.

                     Per     Per
  Country            Cent    Cent
  of Birth.         Urban.  Rural.
  Austria            72.4    27.6
  Balkan States      50.9    49.1
  Finland            50.     50.
  Greece             71.4    28.6
  Hungary            77.3    22.7
  Italy              78.1    21.9
  Portugal           69.6    30.4
  Roumania           91.9     8.1
  Russia             87.     13.
  Turkey, in Asia    86.7    13.3
  Turkey, in Europe  79.5    20.5

  [Illustration: FOREIGN WHITE STOCK, BY PRINCIPAL COUNTRIES OF
  ORIGIN: 1910.

  BORN IN SPECIFIED COUNTRY

  NATIVE--BOTH PARENTS BORN IN SPECIFIED COUNTRY

  NATIVE--ONE PARENT BORN IN SPECIFIED COUNTRY OTHER IN UNITED STATES]




INDEX


  Ability, natural, 10, 12, 13;
    Irish, 40-44;
    Germans, 50, 58, 64;
    Scandinavians, 83-85;
    Italians, 113, 114;
    Slavs, 138, 139;
    Hebrews, 157-164;
    Finns, 169;
    Portuguese, 176;
    Levantines, 190, 193;
    foreign-born, 285-287, 296-299.

  Abstractness, Hebrew, 159-160.

  Agriculture, German immigrants in, 52-53, 62;
    Scandinavians, 73-74, 86;
    Italians, 103-104;
    Slavs, 126-127;
    Hebrews, 147, 160;
    Finns, 169;
    Magyars, 174;
    Portuguese, 181;
    foreign-born, 195, 202-204.

  Alcoholism, Irish, 32-33;
    German, 60-61;
    Scandinavian, 72-73;
    comparative, 104-105;
    Slavic, 127-128, 229;
    Finnish, 169-170;
    Magyar, 175;
    Levantine, 190;
    foreign-born, 215, 229, 255.

  American traits, 23, 290, 295-296.

  Americanism, origins of, 22-23.

  Anti-semitism, 164, 165.

  Assimilation, of Germans, 49-52;
    of Scandinavians, 75-81;
    of Italians, 111-112, 213;
    of Slavs, 134-138;
    of Hebrews, 154, 165-167;
    of Finns, 170;
    of Magyars, 175;
    of Portuguese, 182;
    of Levantines, 194;
    of foreign-born, 245, 250-254, 279-281, 300-303.

  "Assistance" for naturalized voters, 271.

  Attention to details, comparative, 44, 66.

  Avarice, 34, 150-155, 182-183, 188-193, 244, 246, 303.

  Azorean immigrants, 176, 179, 181.


  Balch, Professor, quoted, 127.

  Bankruptcy, fraudulent, 150.

  Bar, immigrants at the, 39, 40, 41, 89, 153.

  Bargain, the individual, 193.

  Bath houses, Finnish, 169.

  Bingham, Gen., quoted, 108-111.

  Bohemian immigrants, 123, 124, 126, 134, 135, 138, 139, 220,
      252, 253.

  "Boss," methods of the, 269-275.

  Boston, 29, 244, 260.

  Bound boys, Greek, 187-190.

  Bremer, Frederika, quoted, 69.

  Browning, quoted, 106.

  Bryce, James, quoted, 51.

  Bushee, Dr., quoted, 29, 145, 180, 244.


  Cahan, Abram, cited, 164.

  Camorra, the, 107.

  Canadian immigrants, 182, 253, 298.

  Cape Cod Portuguese, 179.

  Cape Verde immigrants, 168, 179.

  Capitalists and immigration, 198, 201, 210, 213-219, 286, 287.

  Cartwright, Sir Richard, quoted, 298.

  Caste spirit, growth of, 216, 219, 234-235.

  Caterers, Greek immigrants as, 184, 187.

  "Cavaliers," in Virginia, 7.

  Celtic race traits, 39-44, 64, 85-89.

  Charity-seekers, immigrants as, Irish, 29;
    Germans, 59;
    Italians, 117, 243;
    Hebrews, 149;
    Magyars, 173;
    Syrians, 293;
    foreign-born, 105, 240-245.

  Child delinquency, 245-246.

  Child exploitation, 112, 127, 137, 157, 180, 181, 187-190, 244, 246,
      247, 303.

  Children, proportion of, 22.

  Chinese immigrants, 111, 226.

  Cicero, on the Jews, 143.

  Cities, immigrants in, 76, 112, 126, 145, 182, 202, 239-240, 244,
      260, 282.

  Citizenship, interest of immigrants in acquiring, 101, 112, 136,
      170, 175, 181-182, 264-266, 269-273.

  Civil War, the, 13, 41, 58.

  Clannishness of immigrants, Germans, 54, 57;
    Italians, 112;
    Slavs, 136-137;
    Hebrews, 154, 166-167;
    Portuguese, 182;
    Levantines, 193-194;
    Irish, 260-263;
    foreign-born, 253.

  Clericalism, 123, 135, 136, 252-253, 279-280.

  Coal miners, wages of, 213.

  Colonies, Hebrew agricultural, 147.

  Colonization, of immigrants, 203-204.

  Commercialization, 153, 238, 250.

  Commercialized immigration, 183-4, 195-197, 204, 226.

  Congestion, of Irish, 30;
    of Germans, 60;
    of Scandinavians, 76;
    of Italians, 112, 117-118;
    of Slavs, 126;
    of Hebrews, 145;
    of Magyars, 173-174;
    of Portuguese, 180;
    of Levantines, 194;
    of foreign-born, 238-240, 244, 300-303.

  Convict element in the Colonies, 8-9.

  Cost of living, causes of high, 201-202.

  Courage, 30, 125-126, 262, 295.

  Crises and immigration, 222.

  Cranberry pickers, 179.

  Criminality, Irish, 33, 34;
    German, 61;
    Greek, 62;
    Scandinavian, 72;
    Italian, 98, 101, 106-111;
    Slavic, 129;
    Hebrew, 34, 62, 155-157;
    Finnish, 33, 169;
    Magyar, 175;
    Portuguese, 175-176.

  Criminals, elimination of, in the Colonies, 9.

  Crossing, effects of, 288-289.

  Cumings, quoted, 22.


  Dalmatians in horticulture, 203.

  Danish immigrants, 74, 81.

  Deforestation, 203.

  Democracy, immigrants and, 42, 54-57, 76, 91-92, 119, 136, 158,
      256, 263, 264, 269, 276-281.

  _Deutschtum_ in America, 50-51, 76.

  Displacement, industrial, 207-209.

  Dutch immigrants, 4, 70, 298.


  Economic character of present immigration, 183-184, 195-197, 225,
      298, 299.

  Education, interest of immigrants in, 79, 98, 112, 136, 148,
      157-159, 170, 181, 189, 190, 236, 246, 251-254.

  Elimination, 16-20, 290-292.

  Emigration-promoting, 195-197, 226.

  Emigration to Canada, 298.

  Emotional instability of Italians, 118-119.

  English immigrants, 3-9, 297, 298.

  English, ability to speak, 76, 112, 136-137, 169, 176, 236-237,
      253-254.

  Ethical endowment, race contrasts in, 293-295.


  Fairchild, Professor, quoted, 184, 294.

  Family size, 21-23, 30, 47, 71-72, 127, 130-134, 136, 139, 236,
      244, 287, 292, 299-304.

  Fecundity, early American, 21-23;
    Irish, 26, 29;
    Scandinavian, 71-72;
    Italian, 95;
    Slavic, 130-134, 136, 139-140;
    Portuguese, 180;
    foreign-born, 236, 287, 299-304.

  Ferrero, quoted, 280.

  Feudalism, industrial, 214, 215;
    political, 269-272.

  Finnish immigrants, 168, 173, 299.

  Foreign stock, proportion of, 239-240, 282-285.

  "Forty-eighters," the, 47, 50, 57, 64.

  Franklin, Benjamin, quoted, 11.

  French immigrants, 10, 14, 62, 298.

  Frontier, selective influence of the, 20-23.


  Galician Jews, degradation of, 146, 165.

  Gambling, 98, 105, 156.

  Genoese, 111.

  German immigrants, 10, 17, 46-66;
    numbers, 46-48;
    motives of emigration, 46-48;
    distribution, 49;
    assimilation, 49, 52;
    influence, 52-58, 79;
    drinking customs, 53;
    conviviality, 54;
    politics, 54-55, 259, 262, 263, 276;
    free-thinking, 57-58, 252;
    economic condition, 59-60;
    alcoholism, 60-61;
    criminality, 61-62;
    occupations, 35, 36, 41, 62-63;
    traits, 29, 32, 63-66, 73, 81, 83, 91, 149, 160, 238;
    illiteracy, 70;
    in science, 39, 84;
    in agriculture, 44, 52, 53, 62, 86, 202, 260;
    race affinities, 101;
    in music, 103;
    mortality, 113;
    displacement, 220;
    quality, 298.

  Germany, conditions in, 48, 225, 280.

  Ghetto, the, 145, 149, 290.

  Good looks, among immigrants, 85, 113, 179, 193, 285, 286-289.

  Grant, Gen., quoted, 164.

  Greek immigrants, 62, 182-190, 214, 236, 238, 243, 289, 294, 299.

  Greek physicians, memorial of, 189.

  Gregariousness, Italian, 117-118;
    Hebrew, 145;
    Levantine, 194.


  Hebrew immigrants, numbers, 143, 196;
    sobriety, 61;
    poverty, 30, 180;
    quality, 145, 146, 299;
    occupation, 146-148;
    morals, 149-155;
    crime, 34, 62, 155-157;
    children, 114, 245;
    traits, 31, 118, 157-164, 289-290, 294;
    in politics, 148, 158, 263, 274;
    prospects, 164-167.

  Helmold, quoted, 120-121.

  Heterogeneity, effects of, 229, 276-280.

  Horticulture, immigrants in, 104, 187, 202, 203.

  Honesty, German, 64-65;
    Scandinavian, 72, 83, 91;
    Finnish, 169;
    Magyar, 173;
    North European, 294.

  Housing of immigrants, 26, 30, 60, 76, 112, 117, 126, 145, 169, 173,
      174, 180, 216-222, 244, 300, 301.

  Huguenot immigrants, 10, 14, 298.

  Hungarian Jews, 173.


  Iceland, 67.

  Idealism, 3-4, 50, 57, 64, 81, 91, 149, 170, 269.

  Illiteracy, immigrant, 70;
    Italian, 98;
    Slavic, 124, 136, 138;
    Hebrew, 145;
    Magyar, 174;
   Portuguese, 176;
    foreign-born, 228, 230-233.

  Imagination, Celtic, 40-41;
    Slavic, 138;
    Hebrew, 159;
    Scandinavian lack of, 85-89.

  Immigration Commission, quoted, 107, 135, 140, 189.

  Immigration policy, Jewish efforts to control, 144-145, 150.

  Immodesty, 228.

  _Independent_, the, quoted, 237.

  Industry, immigrants in, 35, 62-63, 75, 125-126, 148, 174, 179-201,
      207-209, 215-216.

  Infant mortality, 130, 133, 228, 201, 292.

  Inquisition, the, in Mexico, 14.

  Insanity, Irish, 28;
    German, 61;
    Scandinavian, 70;
    among the foreign-born, 249-250.

  Instability of employment, growing, 221, 222.

  Ireland, conditions in, 26-28;
    early discrimination against, 31.

  Irish immigrants, 24-45;
    numbers, 24-25;
    motives to emigrate, 25-26;
    quality, 26-28, 298;
    economic condition, 28-32;
    pauperism, 29-30;
    unthrift, 29-31;
    alcoholism, 32-33, 60;
    criminality, 33-34;
    loyalty, 34;
    occupations, 35-39, 220;
    progress, 35-39, 63;
    gifts, 40-45;
    traits, 40-5, 64, 89, 158, 159;
    fecundity, 71, 133;
    illiteracy, 70;
    skill, 62;
    in agriculture, 202;
    displacement, 207;
    in politics, 41, 42, 91, 135, 148, 259-263, 272;
    in science, 84;
    assimilation, 49.

  Italian-American Civic League, 112.

  Italian immigrants, distribution, 96;
    social characteristics, 61, 70, 97, 234, 236, 238;
    types, 97-101;
    occupations, 102-104, 207, 208, 213, 220;
    vices, 104-106;
    crime, 33-34, 62, 72, 106-111, 129;
    assimilation, 111-112;
    ability, 113-117;
    traits, 117-119, 150, 219, 243;
    poverty, 180, 244;
    in agriculture, 103-104, 181, 202-203;
    in politics, 271, 275, 276;
    quality, 289, 293-295, 299.


  Job-buying, by immigrants, 198, 214.

  Journalism, immigrants in, 41, 81, 135, 146, 276.

  Judaism, 165-167.


  Kidnapping, for the Colonies, 8.

  Kollar, quoted, 128.


  Labor organizations, 41, 89, 209-210, 235.

  Labor, political weight of, 266.

  Lawlessness, 106-111, 150-157.

  Levantine immigrants, 190-194, 299.

  Like-mindedness, value of political, 276-280.

  Lithuanian immigrants, 62, 70, 124, 134, 140, 208, 230, 252, 254.

  Litigiousness, Finnish, 169.

  Log houses, Finnish, 168.

  Lottery-gambling, 98, 105, 106.

  Love of liberty as motive for emigration, 14, 46, 47, 145, 169,
      297-299.

  Lying, Italians, 117;
    Hebrews, 150;
    Levantines, 193;
    South Europeans, 293.


  Macedonians, 123, 175.

  Machine, the political, 229, 261-263, 269-275.

  Mafia, the, 107.

  Magyar, immigrants, 33, 34, 61, 168, 169, 173-175, 198, 202, 207,
      208 220, 225, 238, 243.

  Malaria, ravages of, 19-20.

  Male ascendency, 129-134, 180, 193, 219, 235-237.

  Manners, Irish, 40;
    Germans, 53-54, 64;
    Scandinavians, 80, 82-83, 89;
    Italians, 118;
    Hebrews, 149-150;
    Slavs, 228.

  Marine disasters, race behavior in, 295-296.

  Maryland, convicts transported to, 8.

  Mechanical aptitude, want of in Italian immigrants, 113;
    in Greeks, 187.

  Medicine, immigrants in, Irish, 35, 39, 41;
    Germans, 35, 41;
    Hebrews, 148.

  Mediterranean race, the, 97-101, 293-295.

  Merit system, the, 42, 57, 261-262.

  Michaux, quoted, 21.

  Middle Ages, our, 133-136, 228-230, 232, 254-255, 279-280.

  Mining, immigrants in, 35, 74, 125, 207, 208, 213, 214-216, 228.

  Mining conditions in West Virginia, 214-215.

  Mittelberger, quoted, 18.

  Mixed marriages, 166.

  Mongolian immigrants, 168-175.

  Morals, 34, 64-65, 72, 90-91, 101, 105-106, 117, 129, 149-155, 169,
      180-181, 193, 238, 255, 293-295.

  Mortality, immigrant, 17-20, 30, 71, 113, 126, 130-134, 136, 189,
      234, 244, 263, 273-274, 291-292.

  Municipal Government, 229;
    Irish in, 259-263;
    foreign-born in, 269-275.

  Music, immigrant contribution to, 50, 54, 62, 90, 103, 138, 279.


  Naturalization, extent of, 264-266.

  Naturalization frauds, 272-273.

  Natural selection, 14-23, 61, 145, 290, 292.

  Neapolitans, 98-101, 105-106, 107, 113, 117-118, 243.

  New Bedford whalers, 176, 179.

  New York, insane of, 249, 250.

  New York State Hospital Commission, quoted, 249.

  Niceforo, Professor, cited, 98-101.

  Norwegian immigrants, 68, 69, 73, 74, 75, 76, 80, 82-83.

  Nationalism, revival of Slavic, 134-135.


  Occupational preferences, Irish, 35-36;
    German, 62-63;
    Scandinavian, 73-75;
    Italian, 102-104;
    Slavic, 124-127;
    Hebrew, 31;
    146-148;
    Finnish, 169;
    Magyar, 174;
    Portuguese, 179-180;
    Greek, 184-188;
    Levantine, 193;
    foreign-born, 202-203.

  Oriental traits, 190, 193, 237.

  Oversea passage, conditions of, 17-18, 196.


  _Padrone_, the, 188-190, 272.

  Parks, abuse of, 149.

  Parties, immigrants and political, 54-57, 66, 76, 91, 117, 158, 170,
      261-263.

  Patriotism, 136, 170, 251, 269.

  Pauperism, Irish, 29;
    Germans, 59;
    Scandinavians, 59;
    Hebrew, 149;
    Portuguese, 180;
    natives, 209;
    foreign-born, 240-245.

  Peasantism, 135-137; 181-182, 228-233, 237, 254-256, 286, 292.

  Pecorini, quoted, 112.

  Penal transportation, 8.

  Penn, William, 10, 17.

  Pennell, Joseph, quoted, 146.

  Pennsylvania Germans, 10-12, 52, 298.

  Peonage among immigrants, 233-234.

  "Personal liberty," 53, 76, 276, 279.

  Physiognomy of immigrants, 85, 113, 285-289.

  Pioneer breed, the, 20-23, 282, 290, 300.

  Polish immigrants, 124, 126, 127, 133, 135-137, 139-140, 181, 207,
     208, 220, 230, 236, 238, 244, 252, 253, 275, 291.

  Political mysticism, 280-281.

  Political psychology of races, 40-42, 66, 91-92, 119, 194, 261-262,
      294-296.

  Political tendencies of naturalized immigrants;
    of Irish, 39, 41, 42;
    of Germans, 47, 54-55, 66;
    of Scandinavians, 76, 83, 91-92;
    of Italians, 119;
    of Slavs, 136;
    of Hebrews, 144, 148, 158, 279;
    of Finns, 170;
    of Levantines, 194;
    of foreign-born, 229-230, 232, 255-256, 259-281.

  Polyandry, 180-181, 238.

  Portuguese immigrants, 105, 175-182, 202, 236, 289.

  Prejudice in politics, 263.

  Presbyterian immigrants, 12-13.

  Press, the foreign, 50, 135, 146, 156, 276.

  Pride, Magyar, 173, 174.

  Prostitutes, immigrant, 155, 156, 164.

  Public service, Irish in the, 35-39, 259-262;
    Hebrews, 148.

  Puritans, 3-4, 19, 54, 57, 76, 163, 238, 297.

  Pytheas, quoted, 72.


  Quakers, 10, 11, 13.


  Race suicide, 133-134, 299-304.

  Raisin packers, displacement of American, 303.

  Religion, immigrants and, 39, 46, 47, 57, 71, 82, 90, 135, 137,
      157, 166, 182, 237, 252, 253.

  Retardation of school children, 98, 114, 119, 139, 158, 181.

  Roman Catholic policy, 136, 182, 251-254.

  Royalists, migration of, to Virginia, 7.

  Russia, as source of immigrants, 140, 144-145, 169.

  Russo-Jewish immigration, 144-146.

  Ruthenian immigrants, 124, 128, 236.


  Sabbath keeping, 166.

  Saloon keepers, foreign-born, 35, 36, 73, 111, 127, 137, 255, 272,
      275-276.

  Saracen blood, 97, 168.

  Scandinavian immigrants, 67-92;
    numbers, 67;
    distribution, 68, 69;
    social characteristics, 70-72;
    criminality, 72;
    alcoholism, 72-73;
    occupations, 44, 73-75, 202, 260;
    assimilation, 75-79;
    reaction to America, 79-81;
    national contrasts, 81-83;
    intellectual ability, 83-85, 298;
    traits, 32, 42, 43, 85-92, 263, 294.

  School, immigrants and the church, 136, 137, 182, 251-254, 256,
      279, 280.

  School, immigrants and the public, 79, 93, 112, 114, 119, 136, 139,
      158, 159, 170, 181, 182, 246, 250-254, 256, 279-280, 303.

  Science, immigrants in, 39, 58, 66, 81, 148.

  Scotch immigrants, 12, 70, 298.

  Scotch-Irish immigrants, 12-13, 298.

  Servants, indentured, 7-8.

  Servians, 123, 124, 134, 175.

  Servitude of Greek bootblacks, 188-190.

  Sexes, proportion of the, 70, 96, 124, 145, 169, 174, 179, 183,
      237-238.

  "Sexual hospitality," 180-181.

  Shoe-shining parlors, Greek, 187-190.

  Shrine, a miracle-working, 232.

  Sicilian immigrants, 101, 107, 118, 119.

  Slavic immigrants;
    race, 120-123, 173;
    groups, 123-124;
    quality, 174, 299;
    occupations, 124-127, 207, 208, 210, 213, 215, 216, 220;
    alcoholism, 33, 127-129, 229;
    crime, 72, 129;
    fecundity, 129-134, 303;
    assimilation, 134-138, 239;
    in agriculture, 126, 127, 203;
    ability, 138-139, 246;
    future, 139-140;
    traits, 34, 219, 243, 244, 252, 254, 289, 291, 292.

  Slovak immigrants, 86, 124, 130, 137, 208, 238, 252, 253.

  Sociability, 32, 40-42, 64, 82, 89-90, 117-118, 194, 261-262.

  Social decline, 127, 133-138, 145, 155-157, 228-230, 254-256.

  Social evil, the, 34, 107, 129, 150, 153, 155-157, 164, 174, 175,
      180-181, 228, 237-238, 245, 274.

  Socialism, 40, 66, 82, 159, 160, 170.

  Social pressure, rise of, 222-226.

  South, the;
    Germans in, 49;
    attitude toward Italians, 104;
    political spirit, 263.

  Spanish-American colonies, 14.

  Spencer, Herbert, quoted, 288.

  Split-family immigration, 96, 124, 137, 174, 238.

  Sports, immigrants in athletic, 43, 63, 90, 289, 290.

  Standards, contrast of, 216, 300-303.

  Stature of immigrants, 63, 98, 101, 102, 126, 289.

  Steerage traffic, volume of, 197.

  "Sterility," American, 299-304.

  Strike-breakers, immigrants as, 207, 208, 219, 236.

  Survival of the fittest, 17-21, 290-292.

  Swedish immigrants, 68, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 81, 82, 83, 85, 168,
      169.

  Syrian immigrants, 61, 176, 190-194, 243, 289, 293.


  Tammany Hall, 274.

  Tariff, the protective, 198, 201.

  Teachers of foreign stock, 36, 43, 75, 89, 148, 254.

  Team work, 108, 294, 295.

  Temperance Finns, 170.

  Thomas, Professor, quoted, 129.

  _Trachoma_, 190.

  Trade, immigrants in, 65, 86, 103, 144-148, 150-153, 159, 184-187,
      190, 193.

  Trade immorality, 150-153.

  Trade unionism, 209-210.

  Trickiness, 150-155.

  Tuberculosis, among the Scandinavian immigrants, 71.

  Teutonic traits, 29, 32, 35, 41, 42, 44, 63-66, 81, 91, 160, 262,
      293, 295.


  "United Societies," the, 276.

  United States Steel Corporation, 210.

  Universities, immigrants' children in, 39, 79, 81, 148, 170, 236.


  Veracity, Norwegians, 83;
    North Europeans, 293.

  Violence, tendency to, 33, 98-99, 105-111, 118-119, 128, 129, 136,
      169-70, 175, 193.

  Virginia, peopling of, 4-9.

  Von Hupka, quoted, 130.


  Wages, effect of immigrants on, 210-213.

  Walker, Francis A., quoted, 300.

  Wells, H. G., quoted, 255.

  Wergeland, Dr., quoted, 80.

  West, influence of the, 21-23.

  Wife desertion, 34, 255.

  Will, strength of, 13, 163.

  Women, position of immigrant, 40, 47, 52, 103, 128, 129-134, 136,
      149, 170, 180, 190, 193, 219, 235-237, 255, 295, 303.

  Woods, quoted, 22.

  Wood's Run, 239.

  Work conditions, immigrants and, 214-219.


  Yellow journalism and immigration, 233.


  Zangwill, quoted, 144.

       *       *       *       *       *

Transcriber's note:

Minor typographical and punctuation errors have been corrected
without note. Irregularities and inconsistencies in the text have
been retained as printed.

The illustrations have been moved so that they do not break up
paragraphs, thus the page number of the illustration might not match
the page number in the List of Illustrations. In the list of
illustrations: referring to page 201 - "Sunday Group of Roumanian
Street Workers". "Street" changed to "Steel".

The cover for the eBook version of this book was created by the
transcriber and is placed in the public domain.





End of Project Gutenberg's The Old World in the New, by Edward Alsworth Ross

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