environed by the coke regions and has an almost totally foreign population says:

They make reliable citizens. They can be trusted absolutely. Their worst enemy is drink; but when a foreigner comes before me and is fined, if he has no money and I let him go home, he will come the next day to pay his fine even if he lives ten miles from town. Yet in spite of the fact that the "Hunkey" and the "Dago" have helped build up Greensburg and have enriched its citizens, they are still held in contempt by the majority of its people.

This same official told me that a few years ago when the Italians celebrated their Independence Day, the High School boys of that city threw decayed vegetables at them and their national flag.

Without the slightest reserve I can say this: Wherever an enlightened official, like this mayor, or teachers of the public schools, ministers of the Gospel and business men, have come in real contact with the new immigrant, their verdict was entirely different from that of Mr. Edwards and many of the professional writers upon the problem which the foreigner represents.

There are some places in the United States where I have found the immigrant a menace, and one of them is in Pittston, Pennsylvania. There the Italian is really bad; there he is an Anarchist and a murderer. But in Pittston I discovered the really bad American, an Anarchist and a murderer; although he may be the owner of some of the mines or a high official in the town. In that city, every law which governs mining has been openly violated, and there is at least one mine in the place which is nothing but a deep hell-hole and is known as such by the men compelled to work in it. It is a mine in which anything may be had for a bribe and anything may be done without fear of punishment. In one of the last communal elections, the candidate for its highest office kept open house, with beer and "booze" in one of the miners' shacks; young boys, not out of their teens, were allowed to drink to intoxication, and the candidate already mentioned was not an Italian or a Slav or a Jew; but an American, unto the tenth generation, and a member of a Protestant church.

I do not rejoice in writing this or in telling it as I have had to

tell it in the towns affected, and to the very men who have thus offended.

It is painful to me, because, after all, I do not feel myself so closely identified with the immigrant as with the American. While my sympathies are with the immigrant, they are much more with this, my country, and with that circle of the native born, whose ideals, whose hopes, and whose aspirations have become mine.

I am not greatly concerned with immigration, per se; that is a subject for the economist, which I am not. It is for him, if he is skilled enough, to know whether we can afford to keep our gates open to the millions who come, or when and to whom to close them.

Narrowly, or perhaps selfishly, I am concerned for those who are here; that they be treated justly, with due appreciation of their worth, and that they may see that best in the American which has bound me to him, to his land and to its history; to its best men living, and to those of its dead who left a great legacy, too great to be squandered by a prodigal generation.

Knowing how great this legacy is, and yet may be for the blessing of mankind, I am pleading for this new immigrant. If we care at all for that struggling, striving mass of men, unblessed as yet by those gifts of Heaven which have blessed us, let us prove to these people of all kindreds and races and nations, that our God is the Lord, that His law is our law and that all men are our brothers.

IMMIGRANTS IN CITIES 1

E. A. GOLDENWEISER, EXPERT IN CHARGE OF CITY INQUIRY, UNITED STATES IMMIGRATION COMMISSION

SEVEN

cities were included by the Federal Immigration Commission in its study of conditions: New York, which with its hundreds of thousands of tenement houses and with an equal number of pages describing their evils is preeminently the congested city; Chicago, which in lifting itself out of a swamp left behind many a basement where the poor seek shelter, and many a yard which is dry only in the hottest season; Philadelphia, with its network of narrow alleys with surface drainage, its three-room houses with insufficient water supply and sanitary equipment, in a word, with its "horizontal tenement houses"; Boston, where "Americans in process" succeed each other in the restricted area of the North and the West Ends, and where the one-family dwelling, converted for the use of several households, emphasizes the rapid change of conditions; Cleveland, which awoke to find itself one of the leading cities in America and has not had time to think of the necessity of protecting itself from the slum; Buffalo, with its enormous colony of Poles who have come from farms in Europe and have to learn the solution of the problem of existence in a city; and Milwaukee, the most foreign city of them all, where there is no limit of space, and where in spite of that, economic pressure frequently results in crowding of houses on a lot and of persons in a house.

It was felt that an inquiry covering representative districts in these seven cities could safely be accepted as indicative of what may be found elsewhere in the United States, in the poorest environment and most congested quarters. This also would afford a much broader basis for judgment than the study of a single locality. For many reasons the problem of the

1 From The Survey, January 1, 1911.

immigrant in large cities has for almost a generation attracted a great deal of attention. The vast majority of immigrants land in two or three seaports, and large numbers remain there, for a time at least. The phenomenal growth of cities and the difficulties accompanying their growth have been intensified by the influx of millions of aliens, who for the most part are unacquainted with urban conditions in their own countries, and are dazed by the complexity of existence in the great American cities. And it must be remembered that writers, like immigrants, congregate in large cities, and their proximity to the foreign colonies has had its natural result. The social reformer who wishes to remedy preventable evils, as well as the journalist who is anxious to present readable material, has consistently dwelt on the crowding and filth, the poverty and destitution, of which there are such extreme instances in the poorer quarters of every city. Public opinion has been aroused, and legislation enacted which has tended to minimize the evils of overcrowding in many of the older cities, and to inform the younger cities of the dangers of unregulated growth. But the result also has been to create in the popular imagination an impression that the extreme instances cited are the whole story, and that the congested quarters of large cities, full of filth, squalor, and depraved humanity, are a menace to the nation's health and morals. Moreover, the responsibility for these conditions is almost universally placed by old residents on the immigrant, and primarily on the recent immigrant, from the South and East of Europe. The Italian, the Hebrew, and the Slav, according to popular belief, are poisoning the pure air of our otherwise well-regulated cities; and if it were not for them there would be no congestion, no filth, and no poverty in the great industrial and commercial centers of America.

Once the cities were selected, the problem was to choose the districts. The method of study agreed upon was to canvass a certain number of blocks, representing the most important races in each city and the worst representative conditions. After the blocks had been selected every household living there was visited, and schedules were secured from them. In this way the study was not confined to individual cases showing extremes of poverty or of prosperity, but included every family that resided within the chosen quarter. In most cases the blocks studied were uniformly

populated by one race. It was no easy problem to find blocks of that description. The population of the districts in many instances changes so rapidly, that the race which predominates in one of them to-day may constitute but a small minority tomorrow. City officials and settlement workers were helpful in locating foreign colonies, but in addition we interviewed physicians, district nurses, grocers, letter-carriers, priests, and saloonkeepers. It was especially difficult to find solid blocks of Irish and of Germans, and it is only fair to add that the households of these older races often represent the failures which were left behind when their more successful countrymen moved to better neighborhoods. For the sake of comparison, it was felt that some American households ought to be included; but that was a still harder proposition. What was meant by Americans were households whose heads were natives of native fathers. Few such households were found in crowded districts, and never did they form the majority of the population of a block. They were studied whenever found within the specified areas inhabited by working people. In Boston, to secure one hundred family schedules from such native stock, about 700 homes were visited. It is worthy of note that the search for Americans in the poorer quarters of American cities was an arduous task.

To secure the desired information from every family visited was not always an easy undertaking. The recent immigrants, who are more accustomed to a paternalistic government and have not learned the hall-marks of American liberty, were the easiest to interview. Some of the old residents, who have learned to look upon themselves as the sovereign people and consider the government as their agent, were unwilling to answer the questions. I shall never forget my own experience with an Irish woman, twice my size, but as it turned out with a bad memory for faces, who not only refused to answer my timid questions, but took the trouble to escort me downstairs and to threaten violence should I come "nosing around" again. This was at the very outset of the work. A month or two later, fortified by accumulated experience, I returned to the same house and obtained schedules from all the tenants, including my formidable antagonist, who this time was quite accommodating and confided that she knew the difference between a real government agent