enement population, when I asked the
agent of a notorious Fourth Ward alley how many people might be living
in it, I was told: One hundred and forty families--one hundred Irish,
thirty-eight Italian, and two that spoke the German tongue. Barring the
agent herself, there was not a native-born individual in the court. The
answer was characteristic of the cosmopolitan character of lower New
York, very nearly so of the whole of it, wherever it runs to alleys and
courts. One may find for the asking an Italian, German, French, African,
Spanish, Bohemian, Russian, Scandinavian, Jewish, and Chinese colony.
The one thing you shall ask for in vain in the chief city of America is
a distinctively American community."

[Sidenote: The Peril of Poverty]

The immigrant is nearly always poor, and is thrust into the poverty of
the city. We must distinguish between pauperism and poverty. As Mr.
Hunter points out, in his stirring chapter on this subject,[76]
"pauperism is dependence without shame, poverty is to live miserable we
know not why, to have the dread of hunger, to work sore and yet gain
nothing." Fear of pauperism, of the necessity of accepting charity,
drives the self-respecting poor insane and to suicide. It is to be said
that the majority of the immigrants are not paupers, but self-respecting
poor. Moreover, the new immigration is not nearly so ready to accept
pauperism as are the Irish, who make up the largest percentage of this
class, as already shown. But the poor immigrants are compelled, by
circumstances, to come in contact with, if not to dwell directly among
this pauper element, lost to sense of degradation. The paupers make up
the slums. And because the rents are cheaper in the miserable old
rookeries that still defy public decency, the Italians especially crowd
into these pestilential quarters, which are the hotbeds of disease,
physical and moral filth, drunkenness, and crime. Thus pauperism and
poverty dwell too closely together.

[Sidenote: Some Causes of Poverty]

Upon the unskilled masses the weight of want is constantly pressing.
Unemployment, sickness, the least stoppage of the scant income, means
distress. It is estimated that in our country not less than 4,000,000
persons are dependents or paupers, and not less than 10,000,000 are in
poverty. This means that they cannot earn enough regularly to maintain
the standard of life that means the highest efficiency, and that at some
time they are liable to need ai