in the countries of Eastern Europe leads to the inevitable conclusion that the key to the Jewish immigration is to be found not in the force of economic attraction exercised in the United States but rather in the exceptional economic, social, and legal conditions in Eastern Europe which have been created as a result of governmental persecution.

Reviewing the various phases of the history of Jewish immigration for these thirty years, we are enabled to see more closely its nature. The study of the immigration, its movement and its social and economic characteristics, in comparison with those of other immigrant peoples, has revealed in it a number of distinguishing traits. In the causes of the emigration of the Jews, in the pressure exerted upon their movement as reflected in their rate of immigration, in their family movement, in the permanence of their settlement, and in their occupational distribution have been found characteristics which mark them off from the rest of the immigrant peoples. The number of these characteristics and the degree in which they are found in the Jewish immigration, put it in a class by itself.

The facts of governmental pressure amounting to an expulsive force, and reflected in an extraordinary rate of immigration, in a movement of families unsurpassed in the American immigration, the largest part economically dependent, in an occupational grouping of skilled artisans, able to earn their livelihood under normal conditions, and in a permanence of settlement in this country incomparable in degree and indicating that practically all who come stay-all these facts lead irresistibly to the conclusion that in the Jewish movement we are dealing, not with an immigration, but with a migration. What we are witnessing to-day, and for these thirty years, is a Jewish migration of a kind and degree almost without a parallel in the history of the Jewish people. When, in speaking of the beginnings of Russian Jewish immigration to Philadelphia, David Sulzberger said: "In thirty years the movement of Jews from Russia to the United States has almost reached the dignity of the migration of a people," he used no literary phrase. In view of the facts that have developed, this statement is true without any qualification. This migration-process explains the remarkable growth of the Jewish population in the United States, within a relatively short

period of time. In this transplantation, the spirit of social solidarity and communal responsibility prevalent among the Jews has played a vital part.

The family rather than the individual thus becomes the unit for the social life of the Jewish immigrant population in the United States. In this respect the latter approaches more nearly the native American population than does the foreign white or immigrant population. One of the greatest evils incident to and characteristic of the general immigration to this country is thereby minimized.

Again, the concentration of the Jewish immigrants in certain trades explains in great measure the peculiarities of the occupational and the urban distribution of the Jews in the United States. The development of the garment trades through Jewish agencies is largely explained by the recruiting of the material for this development through these laborers.

These primary characteristics of the Jewish immigration of the last thirty years will serve to explain some of the most important phases of the economic and social life of the Jews in the United States, three fourths of whom are immigrants of this period.

Of all the features in this historic movement of the Jews from Eastern Europe to the United States, not the least interesting is their passing from civilizations whose bonds with their medieval past are still strong to a civilization which began its course unhampered by tradition and unyoked to the forms and institutions of the past. The contrast between the broad freedom of this democracy and the intolerable despotism from whose yoke most of them fled has given them a sense of appreciation of American political and social institutions that is felt in every movement of their mental life.

BY JOHN FOSTER CARR, DIRECTOR, IMMIGRATION PUBLICATION SOCIETY, NEW YORK

"N

JEVER judge a ship from the shore," say the Tuscans, and the contadino, who is fond of proverbs, often quotes this bit of traditional wisdom when he finds that his wolf was only a gray dog after all. Hamlet's cloud is not a camel; nor is an honest workman a shiftless beggar buffoon. The laborer and not the organ-grinder now represents the Italian in America; but the popular idea mistakes the one for the other. Thanks to the secluded ways of Italians, the actual facts of their life among us are almost entirely unknown. In common with Mexicans and Jews, they are pilloried by insulting nicknames. They are charged with pauperism, crime, and degraded living, and they are judged unheard and almost unseen. These short and sturdy laborers, who swing along the streets with their heavy stride early in the morning and late at night, deserve better of the country. They are doing the work of men, and they are the full equals of any national army of peasant adventurers that ever landed on our shores.

To brand an Italian immigrant with the word "alien" is to curse him for being unlike ourselves. But when we know who and what he is, and why he comes to the United States, and what he becomes after he gets here, we recognize human kinship, and see what we ourselves should be with different birth and breeding. One serious misconception starts in a name. It is as misleading to dub a nation "Latin" as "Anglo-Saxon." Italians differ from one another almost as much as men can differ who are still of the same color. Ethnography now makes its classifications according to cranial formation. Most northern Italians are of the Alpine race and have short, broad skulls. All southern Italians are of the Mediterranean race and have long, narrow 1 From The Outlook, February 24, 1906.

skulls. Between the two lies a broad strip of country, in northern and central Italy, peopled by those of mixed blood. History has a less theoretical story to tell, and explains the differences that separate near neighbors, in the north as in the south. If a single race ever inhabited Italy to form an original parent stock, it has borne the grafts of so many other races that all sign of it is lost. For prolonged periods sometimes one part of the land, sometimes another, and sometimes the whole peninsula and the islands, have been held in the power of Phoenicians, Greeks, the countless wild hordes of the North, the Saracens, the Spanish, French, and Germans. They all came in great numbers and freely married with native women. In the northeast there is a Slav intermixture, and a trace of the Mongol. In appearance the Italian may be anything from a tow-headed Teuton to a swarthy Arab. Varying with the district from which he comes, in manner he may be rough and boisterous; suave, fluent, and gesticulative; or grave and silent.

These differences extend to the very essentials of life. The provinces of Italy are radically unlike, not only in dress, cookery, and customs, but in character, thought, and speech. A distinct change of dialect is often found in a morning's walk, and it would probably be impossible to travel fifty miles along any road in Italy without meeting greater differences in language than can be found in our English anywhere between Maine and California. The schools, the army, and the navy are now carrying the Italian language to the remotest province, but an ignorant Valtellinese, from the mountains of the north, and an ignorant Neapolitan have as yet no means of understanding each other; and, what is more remarkable, the speech of the unschooled peasant of Genoa is unintelligible to his fellow of Piedmont, who lives less than one hundred miles away. A Genoese ship's captain can understand his Sicilian sailors, when they are talking familiarly among themselves, about as well as an English commander of a "Peninsular and Oriental" liner can follow the jabbering of his Lascar crew. Nor can ignorant men from some of the provinces understand the pure Italian. Two classes were recently held in the Episcopal Church of San Salvatore, in Broome Street, New York, to teach Sicilians enough Italian to enable them to use their prayer-book.

The age-long political division of Italy into a number of petty States preserved all differences and inspired an intense local patriotism; nor did the narrow belfry spirit wholly vanish with the political union of 1870. Relics of it are still found. Ask a Roman peasant if he is an Italian, and he is as likely as not to say "No," that he is a Roman; and so with a Genoese or a Neapolitan. In dislike or indifference toward those from other parts of the country, the Italian abroad usually seeks those of his own city or province. In the same way, little circles of friends are formed in the Italian army and navy. Question a group of sailors on shore leave from an Italian man-of-war, and you will probably find that, with perhaps a single exception, they are all of one place. Ask them how this happens, and they may tell you, as they have told me, laughing: "Friendship is for those from the same fatherland."

These profound dissimilarities make sweeping generalities about Italians impossible. Yet in one point every province is alike. The poor everywhere are all crushed by heavy taxes for maintenance of the large army and navy which make Italy a firstclass European power. More serious than the exactions of the taxgatherer is the long-continued agricultural depression that has reduced a large part of the south to poverty. Nor is this all. The peasant's lot is made infinitely worse by an Irish question that is the blight of nearly all southern Italy, Sicily, and Sardinia. There are the same huge entailed estates and the same lazy, reactionary, and absentee landlords. Throughout large sections great tracts of fertile soil support only one shepherd or one farmer per square mile. To these idle lands must be added the vast stretches of barren mountains, and the malaria-infested fifth of the entire surface of the peninsula. No new territory has been added to the kingdom, while the population has been increasing within twenty years from twenty-eight and one half to thirty-two and one half millions- an average density for the whole country of 301 per square mile. And the excess of births over deaths amounts to nearly 350,000 a year the population of a province. Through whole districts in this overcrowded land Italians have to choose between emigration and starvation.

A definite economic cause drives the poor Meridionale from his home, and a definite economic cause and not a vague migratory