and New York is a
Hebrew-German-Irish-Italian-Bohemian-Hungarian city--a cosmopolitan race
conglomeration. Eighteen languages are spoken in a single block. In
Public School No. 29 no less than twenty-six nationalities are
represented. This indicates the complicated problem.

[Sidenote: A Jewish City]

New York is the chief Jewish capital. Of the 760,000 Jews on Manhattan,
about 450,000 are Russian, and they overcrowd the East Side ghetto. In
that quarter the signs are in Hebrew, the streets are markets, the shops
are European, the men, women, and children speak in Yiddish, and all
faces bear the foreign and Hebrew mark plainly upon them.

[Sidenote: An Italian City]

Go on a little further and you find that you are in Little Italy, quite
distinct from Jewry, but not less foreign. Here the names on the signs
are Italian, and the atmosphere is redolent with the fumes of Italy. The
hurdy-gurdy vies with the push-cart, the streets are full of children
and women, and you are as a stranger in a strange land. You would not be
in a more distinctively Italian section if you were by magic
transplanted to Naples or Genoa.

[Sidenote: A Foreign City]

[Sidenote: Other Foreign Cities]

Nor is it simply the East Side in lower New York that is so manifestly
foreign. Go where you will on Manhattan Island and you will see few
names on business signs that do not betray their foreign derivation. Two
out of every three persons you meet will be foreign. You will see the
Italian gangs cleaning the streets, the Irish will control the motor of
your trolley-car and collect your fares, the policeman will be Irish or
German, the waiters where you dine will be French or German, Italian or
English, the clerks in the vast majority of the shopping places will be
foreign, the people you meet will constantly remind you of the rarity of
the native American stock. You are ready to believe the statement that
there are in New York more persons of German descent than of native
descent, and more Germans than in any city of Germany except Berlin.
Here are nearly twice as many Irish as in Dublin, about as many Jews as
in Warsaw, and more Italians than in Naples or Venice. In government, in
sentiment, in practice, as in population (thirty-seven per cent.
foreign-born and eighty per cent. of foreign birth or parentage), the
metropolis is predominantly foreign, and in elections the foreign vote,
shrewdly manipulated for the most part, controls. Nor is th