Through their knowledge of our speech and ways, the children have a great advantage in their efforts to slip the parental leash. The bad boy tells his father that whipping "doesn't go" in this country. Reversing the natural order, the child becomes the fount of knowledge, and the parents hang on the lips of their precocious offspring. If the policeman inquires about some escapade or the truant officer gives warning, it is the scamp himself who must interpret between parent and officer. The immigrant is braced by certain Old-World loyalties, but his child may grow up loyal to nothing whatever, a rank egoist and an incorrigible who will give us vast trouble before we are done with him.
Still, the child is not always to blame. "Often the homes are so crowded and dirty," says a probation officer, "that no boy can go right. The Slavs save so greedily that their children become disgusted with the wretched home conditions and sleep out." One hears of foreign-born with several boarders sending their children out to beg or to steal coal. In one city investigation showed that only a third of the Italian children taken from school on their fourteenth birthday were needed as bread-winners. Their parents thought only of the sixty cents a week. In another only one-fourteenth of the Italian school children are above the primary grades, and one-eleventh of the Slavic, as against two-fifths of the American school children in grammar grades or high school. Miss Addams tells of a young man from the south of Italy who was mourning the death of his little girl of twelve. In his grief he said quite simply: "She was my oldest kid. In two years she would have supported me, and now I shall have to work five or six years longer until the next one can do it." He expected to retire permanently at the age of thirty-four.
Dependent Italian Family, Cleveland. (Two Children Absent)
Dependent Slovak Family, Cleveland
INSANITY AMONG THE FOREIGN-BORN
Not only do the foreign-born appear to be more subject to insanity than the native-born, but when insane they are more likely to become a public charge. Of the asylum population they appear to constitute about a third. In New York during the year ending September 30, 1911, 4218 patients who were immigrants or of immigrant parents were admitted to the insane hospitals of the State. This is three-quarters of the melancholy intake for that year. Only one out of nine of the first admissions from New York City was of native stock. The New York State Hospital Commission declares that "the frequency of insanity in our foreign population is 2.19 times greater than in those of native birth." In New York City it "is 2.48 times that of the native-born."