Roberts: The New Immigration.
Jenks and Lauck: Immigration.
Woods: Americans in Process.
Willis: "Findings of the Immigration Commission," art. in The Survey, 25: 571-578.
CHAPTER XXXI[ToC]
HOW THE WORKING PEOPLE LIVE
238. In Europe.—A large proportion of the immigrants from Europe have been peasants who have come out of rural villages to find a home in the barracks of American cities. In the Old World they have lived in houses that lacked comfort and convenience; they have worked hard through a long day for small returns; and a government less liberal and more burdened than the United States has mulcted them of much of their small income by heavy taxes. Young men have lost two or three years in compulsory military training, and their absence has kept the women in the fields. From the barracks men often return with the stigma of disease upon them, which, added to the common social evils of intemperance and careless sex relations, keeps moral standards low. Thousands of them are illiterate, few of them have time for recreation, and those who do understand little of its possibilities. Religion is largely a matter of inherited superstition, and as a superior force in life is quite lacking. To people of this sort comes the vision of a land where government is democratic, military conscription is unknown, wages are high, and there is unlimited opportunity to get ahead. Encouraged by agents of interested parties, many a man accumulates or borrows enough money to pay his passage and to get by the immigration officer on the American side, and faces westward with high hope of bettering his condition.