instinct brings him to America. He comes because the country has the most urgent need of unskilled labor. This need largely shapes the character of our Italian immigration, and offers immediate work to most of the newcomers. Almost eighty per cent of them are males; over eighty per cent are between the ages of fourteen and forty-five; over eighty per cent are from the southern provinces, and nearly the same percentage are unskilled laborers, who include a large majority of the illiterates. These categories overlap, so that the bulk of our Italian immigration is composed of ignorant, able-bodied laborers from the south. They come by the hundred thousand, yet their great numbers are quickly absorbed without disturbing either the public peace or the labor market. In spite of the enormous immigration of Italians in 1903 and 1904, the last issue of the United States Labor.Bulletin shows that the average daily wage of the laborer in the North Atlantic States the "congested" district at the very gates of Ellis Island - had increased within the year from $1.33 to $1.39. And 1904 was not a particularly prosperous year. Equally significant, in view of the unprecedented Italian immigration of the first six months of this year, is the announcement in the last number of the Bulletin of the New York State Department of Labor that the improvement in the conditions of employment has been so marked, and "the proportion of idle wage-earners has diminished so rapidly, that the second quarter of 1905 surpasses that of 1902, the record year."

The demand of the East for labor is first heard by the new arrival who needs to look for work, and probably a majority of Italian braccianti never go more than a hundred and fifty miles away from New York. Immediate work and high wages, and not a love for the tenement, create our "Little Italies." The great enterprises in progress in and about the city, the subways, tunnels, waterworks, railroad construction, as well as the ordinary building operations, call for a vast army of laborers. For new and remodeled tenements alone, authorized by the Building Department between April and June, 1905, the estimated cost was over $39,000,000. This gives one measure of the demand. A labor leader has furnished another. At a recent conference, arguing that restriction of immigration would benefit

American labor, he said that an authority in the building trade had calculated that with immigration suspended, common labor in New York would be receiving $3 within a year. He had not calculated the paralysis that such a wage would inflict upon industry.

Of all that come in response to our national invitation to the worker, the educated Italian without a manual trade is the Italian who most signally fails in America. He is seen idling at the cheap restaurants everywhere in the Italian colonies. But the illiterate laborer takes no chances. He usually has definite knowledge of precisely where work is needed before he leaves home. Fifteen thousand immigrants sometimes reach Ellis Island in a single day. Yet each Italian must earn his living in some way, and that at once, for he brings no more than eight or ten dollars with him.

This same inborn conservatism that risks nothing makes of southern Italians the most mobile supply of labor that this country has ever known. Migratory laborers, who come here to work during eight or nine months of the year, and return between October and December, are a very large part of the annual immigration. They form a stream of workers that ebbs and flows from Italy to America in instant response to demand; and yet the significance of the movement has gone almost entirely unnoticed. More than 98,000 Italians - laborers and others, but chiefly laborers went back to Italy in 1903. In 1904, owing to a temporary lull in our prosperity and the general business uncertainty during a Presidential campaign, the demand slackened. The common laborer, who ordinarily pays a padrone fifty cents as a fee for employment, was offering as high as five dollars for a job in the summer of 1904. In the end, more than 134,000 Italians returned to Italy within the year, and we were saved the problem of an army of unemployed.

If the ignorant immigrant is a menace, the mobility of Italian unskilled labor has conferred another blessing upon us, for it is the very element that contains a large majority of the dreaded illiterates. The whole number of them who enter the community thus gives no indication of the number who are permanently added to our population, and the yearly percentage of their arrivals since 1901 has fallen from 59.1 per cent to 47 per cent,

and is likely to fall still lower. But there is something to be said on behalf of the illiterates who remain among us. They are never Anarchists; they are guiltless of the so-called "black hand" letters. The individual bracciante is, in fact, rarely anything but a gentle and often a rather dull drudge, who still has wit enough to say that he knows he cannot be Cæsar, and is very well content to be plain Neapolitan Nicola. Knowledge is power, but an education gives no certificate of character, and still less does ability to read and write afford any test whatever either of morals or of brains. A concrete instance gives a practical proof. There are more than four times as many illiterates in the general population of the United States as were found, according to the last published report, among those arrested in Greater New York between January 1 and March 31, 1905: 44,014 persons were arrested; of these, only 1175, or a little over 2.6 per cent, were unable to read or write. The percentage of illiteracy for the entire United States is 10.6 per cent, and for that of the native whites alone 4.6 per cent.

The very success of American schools goes far in explaining the mystery of our exorbitant demand for unskilled labor. In proportion as they fulfill their mission they are depriving us of the rough laborer. The boy who is forbidden by the New York law to leave school until he is fourteen years old and has reached the fifth grammar grade, later in life does not join a gang that digs sewers and subways. Such laborers are recruited from the illiterate, or nearly illiterate those who have failed in the beginning of the struggle in which brains count. For our future supply of the lower grades of labor we must depend more and more upon countries with a poorer school system than ours.

Lies have short legs, the Florentine tag has it, but the Italian is still accused of being a degenerate, a lazy fellow and a pauper, half a criminal, a present danger, and a serious menace to our civilization. If there is a substantial basis of truth in these charges, it must appear very clearly in Greater New York, which is now disputing Rome's place as the third largest Italian city in the world. Moreover, New York contains nearly two fifths of all the Italians in the United States, and in proportion to its size it is the least prosperous Italian colony in the country, and shelters a considerable part of our immigrant

failures those who cannot fall into step with the march of American life.

First, as to the paupers. The Italian inhabitants of New York City number nearly 450,000; the Irish, somewhat over 300,000. In males the criminal sex the Italians outnumber the Irish about two to one. Yet by a visit to the great almshouse on Blackwell's Island and an examination of the unpublished record for 1904, I found that during that year 1564 Irish had been admitted, and only 16 Italians. Mr. James Forbes, the chief of the Mendicancy Department of the Charity Organization Society, tells me that he has never seen or heard of an Italian tramp. As for begging, between July 1, 1904, and September 30, 1905, the Mendicancy Police took into custody 519 Irish and only 92 Italians. Pauperism has a close relation with suicide, and of such deaths during the year the record counts 89 Irish and 23 Italians. The Irish have always supplied much more than their share of our paupers; but Irish brawn has contributed its full part to the prosperity of the country; and the comparatively large proportion of Irish inmates in all our penal institutions never justified the charge that the Irish are a criminal race, or Irish immigration undesirable. That was the final answer to the Know-Nothing argument!

Nor do court records show that Italians are the professional criminals they are said to be. Take the city magistrates' reports for the year ending December 31, 1901 the latest date for which all the necessary data are available. At that time, using Dr. Laidlaw's estimate of additions by immigration to the population of the city to May 1, 1902, there were about 282,804 Irish and 200,549 Italians in Greater New York. If the proportion of the sexes remained unchanged from the taking of the census, there were 117,599 Irish males, and 114,673 Italian. This near equality of the criminal sex in the two nationalities makes possible a rough measure of Italian criminality.

In these columns of crime the most striking fact in the Italian's favor is a remarkable showing of sobriety. During the year, 7281 Irish were haled into court accused of "intoxication" and "intoxication and disorderly conduct," while the Italians arrested on the same charge numbered only 513. With the exception of the Russian Jews, Italians are by far the most sober of all

nationalities in New York, including the native born. Next, noticing only offenses committed with particular frequency, the Italians again appear at a pronounced advantage in: Assaults (misdemeanor), 284 Irish and 139 Italians; disorderly conduct, 3278 Irish and 1454 Italians; larceny (misdemeanor), 297 Irish and 174 Italians; vagrancy, 1031 Irish and 80 Italians. Insanity is here listed with crime, and there are 146 Irish commitments to 35 Italian. Irish and Italians are nearly at an equality in Burglaries, 63 Irish and 57 Italians; and larceny (felony), 122 Irish and 94 Italians. On the other hand, Italians show at the worst in Violation of corporation ordinance (chiefly peddling without a license), 196 Irish and 1169 Italians; and assault (felony), 75 Irish and 155 Italians. In homicides, quite contrary to the popular impression, the Italians are only charged with the ratio exactly normal to their numbers after taking the average per 100,000 for the whole city, while the Irish are accused of nearly two and one half times their quota: Irish 50, Italians 14. The report for 1903, the last published, after important changes effected by almost two years of immigration, shows an unchanged proportional variation: Irish 59, Italians 21.

The one serious crime to which Italians are prone more than other men is an unpremeditated crime of violence. This is mostly charged, and probably with entire justice, upon the men of four provinces, and Girgenti in Sicily is particularly specified. It is generally the outcome of quarrels among themselves, prompted by jealousy and suspected treachery. The Sicilians' code of honor is an antiquated and repellent one, but even his vendetta is less ruthless than the Kentucky mountaineer's. It stops at the grave. Judged in the mass, Italians are peaceable, as they are law-abiding. The exceptions make up the national criminal record; and as there is a French or English type of criminal, so there is a Sicilian type, who has succeeded in impressing our imaginations with some fear and terror.

The Mafia is the expression of Sicilian criminality, and here, as in Italy, the methods of the Sicilian criminal are the same. For some of his crimes he is more apt to have an accomplice than most other criminals. But there is no sufficient reason for believing that a Mafia, organized as it often is in Italy, a definite society of the lawless, exists anywhere in this country. No one