six hundred thousand reside in New York City--more than in Rome
itself. Naples alone of all the cities of Italy has so large an Italian
population; while Boston has one hundred thousand, Philadelphia one
hundred thousand, San Francisco seventy thousand, New Orleans seventy
thousand, Chicago sixty thousand, Denver twenty-five thousand, Pittsburg
twenty-five thousand, Baltimore twenty thousand, and there are extensive
colonies, often numbering as many as ten thousand, in several other
cities.

So vast a foreign-born population is bound to contain elements of both
strength and weakness. The north Italians are molto simpatici to the
American character, and many of their national traits are singularly
like our own, for they are honest, thrifty, industrious, law-abiding and
good-natured. The Italians from the extreme south of the peninsula have
fewer of these qualities, and are apt to be ignorant, lazy, destitute,
and superstitious. A considerable percentage, especially of those from
the cities, are criminal. Even for a long time after landing in America,
the Calabrians and Sicilians often exhibit a lack of enlightenment more
characteristic of the Middle Ages than of the twentieth century.

At home they have lived in a tumble-down stone hut about fifteen feet
square, half open to the sky (its only saving quality); in one corner
the entire family sleeping in a promiscuous pile on a bed of leaves; in
another a domestic zoo consisting of half a dozen hens, a cock, a goat,
and a donkey. They neither read, think, nor exchange ideas. The sight of
a uniform means to them either a tax-gatherer, a compulsory enlistment
in the army, or an arrest, and at its appearance the man will run
and the wife and children turn into stone. They are stubborn and
distrustful. They are the same as they were a thousand or more years
gone by.

When the writer was acting as an assistant prosecutor in New York
County, a young Italian, barely twenty years of age, was brought to
the bar charged with assault with intent to kill. The complainant was a
withered Sicilian woman who claimed to be his wife. Both spoke an almost
unintelligible dialect. The case on its face was simple enough. An
officer testified that on a Sunday morning in Mulberry Bend Park, at
a distance of about fifty feet from where he was standing, he saw the
defendant, who had been walking peaceably with the complaining witness,
suddenly draw a long and deadly looking knife and proceed to