VITALITY
"The Slavs," remarks a physician, "are immune to certain kinds of dirt. They can stand what would kill a white man." The women do not have puerperal fever, as our women would under their conditions. The men violate every sanitary law, yet survive. The Slavs come from a part of the world in which never more than a third of the children have grown up. In every generation, dirt, ignorance, superstition, and lack of medical attention have winnowed out all but the sturdiest. Among Americans, two-thirds of the children grow up, which means that we keep alive many of the tenderer, who would certainly have perished in the Slavic world. There is, however, no illusion more grotesque than to suppose that our people is to be rejuvenated by absorbing these millions of hardy peasantry, that, to quote a champion of free immigration, "The new-comers in America will bring fresh, vigorous blood to a rather sterile and inbred stock." The fact is that the immigrant stock quickly loses here its distinctive ruggedness. The physicians practising among rural Poles notice a great saving of infant life under American conditions. Says one: "I see immigrant women and their grown daughters having infants at the same time, and the children of the former will die of the things that the children of the latter get well of. The same holds when the second generation and the third bear at the same time. The latter save their children better than the former." The result is a marked softening of fiber between the immigrant women and the granddaughters. Among the latter are many of a finer, but frailer, mold, who would be ruined in health if they worked in the field the third day after confinement, as grandmother did. In the old country there were very few of this type who survived infancy in a peasant family.
There is, then, no lasting revitalization from this tide of life. If our people has become weak, no transfusion of peasants will set it on its feet again; for their blood too, soon thins. The trouble, if you call it that, is not with the American people, but with the wide diffusion among us of a civilized manner of life. Where the struggle for existence is mitigated not merely for the upper quarter of society, as formerly in the Old World, but for the upper three-quarters, as in this and other democratic countries, the effects of keeping alive the less hardy are bound to show. The remedy for the alleged degeneration of our stock is simple, but drastic. If we want only constitutions that can stand hardship and abuse, let us treat the young as they are treated in certain poverty-stricken parts of Russia. Since the mother is obliged to pass the day at work in distant fields, the nursling of a few months is left alone, crawling about on the dirt floor of the hut and comforting itself, when it cries from hunger, by sucking poultices of chewed bread tied to its hands and feet.
MORALITY
That the Mediterranean peoples are morally below the races of northern Europe is as certain as any social fact. Even when they were dirty, ferocious barbarians, these blonds were truth-tellers. Be it pride or awkwardness or lack of imagination or fair-play sense, something has held them back from the nimble lying of the southern races. Immigration officials find that the different peoples are as day and night in point of veracity, and report vast trouble in extracting the truth from certain brunet nationalities.
Some champions of immigration have become broad-minded enough to think small of the cardinal virtues. The Syrians, on Boston testimony, took "great pains to cheat the charitable societies" and are "extremely untrustworthy and unreliable." Their defender, however, after admitting their untruthfulness, explains that their lying is altruistic. If, at the fork of a road, you ask a Syrian your way, he will, in sheer transport of sympathy, study you to discover what answer will most please you. "The Anglo-Saxon variety of truthfulness," she adds, "is not a Syrian characteristic"; but, "if truthfulness includes loyalty, ready self-denial to promote a cause that seems right, the Syrian is to that extent truthful." Quoting a Syrian's admission that his fellow-merchants pay their debts for their credit's sake, but will cheat the customer, she comments, "This, however, does not seem to be exclusively a Syrian vice." To such miserable paltering does a sickly sentimentality lead.
In southern Europe, team-work along all lines is limited by selfishness and bad faith. Professor Fairchild notes "the inveterate factionalism and commercial dishonesty so characteristic of the [Greek] race," "the old dishonesty and inability to work together." "One of the maxims of Greek business life, translated into the American vernacular, is 'Put out the other fellow's eye.'" "These people seemed incapable of carying on a large coöperative business with harmony and success."
Nothing less than verminous is the readiness of the southern Europeans to prey upon their fellows. Never were British or Scandinavian immigrants so bled by fellow-countrymen as are South Italian, Greek and Semitic immigrants. Their spirit of mutual helpfulness saved them from padrone, "banker," and Black Hand. Among our South Italians this spirit shines out only when it is a question of shielding from American justice some cut-throat of their own race. The Greek is full of tricks to skin the greenhorn. A grocer will warn fellow-countrymen who have just established themselves in his town that he will have the police on them for violating municipal ordinances unless they buy groceries from him. The Greek mill-hand sells the greenhorn a job, and takes his chances on the foreman giving the man work. A Greek who knows a little English will get a Greek peddler arrested in order that he may get the interpreter's fee. The Greek boot-black who has freed himself from his serfdom, instead of showing up the system, starts a place of his own, and exploits his help as mercilessly as ever he was exploited.