THE OLD WORLD
IN THE NEW

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

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

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

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."

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."

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 negro 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Typical Norwegian Boy

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.

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

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.

Photograph by Hine

Italian Gypsy Mother and Child

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 negro labor or desirous of deriving a return from their raw land. As a cotton raiser, the Italian has excelled the negro 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 negroes 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