d then he had found
himself in a car mostly filled with Neapolitans from the constructions
far up the line, where he had read how they are worked and fed and
housed like beasts; and listening to the jargon of their unintelligible
dialect, he had occasion for pensive question within himself as to
what notion these poor animals formed of a free republic from their
experience of life under its conditions; and whether they found them
practically very different from those of the immemorial brigandage and
enforced complicity with rapine under which they had been born. But,
after all, this was an infrequent effect, however massive, of travel on
the West Side, whereas the East offered him continual entertainment in
like sort. The sort was never quite so squalid. For short distances the
lowest poverty, the hardest pressed labor, must walk; but March never
entered a car without encountering some interesting shape of shabby
adversity, which was almost always adversity of foreign birth. New York
is still popularly supposed to be in the control of the Irish, but
March noticed in these East Side travels of his what must strike every
observer returning to the city after a prolonged absence: the numerical
subordination of the dominant race. If they do not outvote them,
the people of Germanic, of Slavonic, of Pelasgic, of Mongolian stock
outnumber the prepotent Celts; and March seldom found his speculation
centred upon one of these. The small eyes, the high cheeks, the broad
noses, the puff lips, the bare, cue-filleted skulls, of Russians, Poles,
Czechs, Chinese; the furtive glitter of Italians; the blonde dulness of
Germans; the cold quiet of Scandinavians--fire under ice--were aspects
that he identified, and that gave him abundant suggestion for the
personal histories he constructed, and for the more public-spirited
reveries in which he dealt with the future economy of our heterogeneous
commonwealth. It must be owned that he did not take much trouble about
this; what these poor people were thinking, hoping, fearing, enjoying,
suffering; just where and how they lived; who and what they individually
were--these were the matters of his waking dreams as he stared hard
at them, while the train raced farther into the gay ugliness--the
shapeless, graceful, reckless picturesqueness of the Bowery.

There were certain signs, certain facades, certain audacities of the
prevailing hideousness that always amused him in that uproar to the
eye which