taly is more progressive than the south and the
qualities of the people are of higher grade, but the bulk of
emigration is from the region of Naples and Sicily. Among the southern
Italians the percentage of illiteracy is high, they have the
reputation of being slippery in business relations, and not a few
anarchists and criminals are found among them. It is not reasonable to
expect that these people will measure up to the level of the steady,
reliable, and hard-working American or north European, especially as
large numbers of them are birds of passage spending the winter in
Italy or going home for a time when business in America is depressed.
Yet the great majority of those who settle here are peaceable,
ambitious, and hard-working men and women.

Alongside the Italian is the Slav. There are so many varieties of him
that he is confusing. He comes from the various provinces of Russia,
from the conglomerate empire of Austro-Hungary, and from the Balkan
states. In physique he is sturdier than the Italian and mentally he is
less excitable and nervous, but he drinks heavily and is often
murderous when not sober. The Slav has come to America to find a place
in the sun. At home he has suffered from political oppression and
poverty; he has had little education of body or mind; he is subject to
his primitive impulses as the west European long ago ceased to be. It
is not easy for America to assimilate large numbers of such backward
peoples, but the Slav is coming at the rate of three hundred thousand
a year. The Slav is depended upon for the hard labor of mine and
foundry, of sugar and oil refineries, and of meat-packing
establishments. Hundreds and thousands are in the coal and iron
regions of Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, and West Virginia. The
Bohemians and Poles more frequently than the others bring their
families with them, and to some extent settle in the rural districts,
but the bulk of the Slavs are men who herd in congested
boarding-houses, move frequently from one industrial centre to
another, and naturally are very slow to become assimilated.

233. =The Jews.=--Of all the races that have found asylum in America
none have felt abroad the heavy hand of oppression more than the Jew.
He has been the world's outcast through nineteen centuries, but in
America he has found freedom to expand. One-fifth of all the Jews are
already in America, and the rate of immigration is not far from
140,000 a year. The immigrant Jews are