Legal Remedies Possible
Concerning possible legislation to correct these city evils of environment, Mr. Sargent says: "So far as the overcrowding in city tenements is concerned, municipal ordinances in our large cities prescribing the amount of space which rapacious landlords should, under penalties sufficiently heavy to enforce obedience, be required to give each tenant, would go far toward attaining the object in view. Whether such a plan could be brought into existence through the efforts of our general government, or whether the Congress could itself legislate directly, upon sanitary and moral grounds, against the notorious practice of housing aliens with less regard for health and comfort than is shown in placing brute animals in pens, the Bureau is unprepared to say.
Demands Immediate Remedy
It is, however, convinced that no feature of the immigration question so insistently demands public attention and effective action. The evil to be removed is one that is steadily and rapidly on the increase, and its removal will strike at the root of fraudulent elections, poverty, disease, and crime in our large cities, and on the other hand largely supply that increasing demand for labor to develop the natural resources of our country."[71]
Little Italy
Not to draw the picture all in the darker shades, let us look at the best type of Italian tenement life. We are not left to guesswork in the matter. Settlement workers and students of social questions are actually living in the tenement and slum sections, so as to know by experience and not hearsay. One of these investigators, Mrs. Lillian W. Betts, author of two enlightening books,[72] has lived for a year in one of the most crowded tenements in one of the most densely populated sections of the Italian quarter. We condense some of her statements, which reveal the foreign life of to-day in New York's Little Italy, with its 400,000 souls.
Immigrant Isolation
"A year's residence in an Italian tenement taught me first of all the isolation of a foreign quarter; how completely cut off one may be from everything that makes New York New York. The necessities of life can be bought without leaving the square that is your home. After a little it occasioned no surprise to meet grandparents whose own children were born in New York, who had never crossed to the east side of the Bowery, never seen Broadway, nor ever been south of Houston Street. There was no reason why they should go. Every interest in their life centered within four blocks. I went with a neighbor to Saint Vincent's Hospital, where her husband had been taken. I had to hold her hand in the cars, she was so terrified. She had lived sixteen years in this ward and never been on a street-car before. Of a family of five sons and two daughters, besides the parents, in this country fifteen years, none spoke English but the youngest, born here, and she indifferently. Little Italy was all of America they knew, and of curiosity they had none.
Children American in Spirit
"The house in which we lived was built for twenty-eight families and occupied by fifty-six. One man who had been in the country twenty-eight years could not speak or understand a word of English. Nothing but compulsion made his children use Italian, and the result was pathetic. The eldest child was an enthusiastic American, and the two civilizations were always at war. This boy knew more of American history, its heroes and poetry, than anyone of his age I ever met. This boy had never been five blocks from the house in which we lived. He removed his hat and shoes when he went to bed in winter; in summer he took off his coat. A brother and two sisters shared the folding bed with him. His father hired the three rooms and sublet to a man with a wife and three children. The women quarreled all the time, but worked in the same room, finishing trousers and earning about forty-five cents a day each.