circumstances. The beginning of such knowledge is a familiarity with the characteristics of the chief racial or national groups, and particularly the conditions to which most of them were accustomed before they came to the United States.

PEASANT ORIGINS

The bulk of our immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, except the Jews, are from agricultural districts. This includes the Italians, Poles, Lithuanians, Russians, Slovaks, and Slavic peoples from southern Austria and around the Adriatic Sea. The European agriculturalist does not dwell upon an isolated farm like the American farmer. He is a peasant, by which we mean one closely attached to the soil. He lives in a peasant community, which is a rather compact village, surrounded by the fields to which the peasants go regularly from the villages to work. There is an active communal life. The individual is first and foremost a social being. There is strong emphasis upon the custom of conformity to the group and upon the habit of participation in the group life. This is in strong contrast to the American farmer, who was originally a pioneer and retains many of his early characteristics. Even in well-settled sections of this country conditions as well as traditions emphasize the individual rather than the group.

Very different are the circumstances of the peasant in central or southern Italy, or Sicily, from which most of our two million Italian immigrants come:

In his home village [says Mr. Sartorio] the Italian slept with his family crowded in one room. That did not hurt

him or his family, for they did not live in the room, as they are compelled to do here by the bitter climate; they just slept there for a few hours. During the short, cool Italian nights only were they inside. Life was spent working, eating, and resting in the open air. The sturdy peasant in Italy ate the fruits of his orto, drank the wine of his vineyard, wore the wool of his sheep. No one paid attention, except when he went to church on Sunday, to the way in which he was dressed, and he was not very particular how infrequently he shaved. Early in the morning he called out to his friends across the street as he went to the field. No one was disturbed by it. People were up early in the village. He sang as he crossed the village going to work and coming back; the stornello of his friend answered his song. He walked in the middle of the street as everybody else did, and did not spit on the sidewalk, for the obvious reason that there was none. 1

Take Professor Fairchild's description of the life which most of our 110,000 Greek immigrants left behind them:

Life in Greece is essentially an outdoor life. It does not take the form of athletics to nearly the same extent as in England and in America. . . . But the Greek loves to sit out in the open air. In fine weather the public squares of the cities are closely dotted with tables belonging to the neighboring coffee houses. To-day, as

well as in ancient times, one of the most pronounced features of the Greek character is a sectionalism, a clannishness, an inability to take the point of view of one's neighbor, which has extended beyond the tribal limits to the domain of personal relations and individual character, making it very difficult for Greeks to unite in any common enterprise.2

1 Enrico C. Sartorio, Social and Religious Life of Italians in America, p. 20.

2 Henry Pratt Fairchild, Greek Immigration to the United States, pp. 10, 36.

The primitive character of agriculture among the Polish peasants is illustrated in the following letters. A Polish immigrant had written home from the United States, describing some American agricultural machinery which he had purchased. One of his

family wrote in reply:

Now as to the machines which you bought and which are so expensive, don't they know scythes and sickles there? With these tools you can do much during the summer.1

A father, writing shortly after his boy's departure for America, inquires:

And now, dear son, I ask you, where did you put the ax? Write where you put it, so we shall not have to search for it.2

The picture of that family waiting from one to three months to be told where the ax was, instead of looking for it, may well linger in the memory.

Miss Balch says of the Croatians:

A Croatian house of the poorer sort is often very pretty, with its steep shingled roof and whitewashed or stuccoed sides. Frequently there is no chimney. . . . In poorer houses there may be simply a fire of twigs and branches on the floor and a baby wrapped in rags lying in the ashes. The family sleeps probably in one room, occasionally on straw covered with the curious Croatian blankets which are almost as shaggy as the original sheep, and woven in bright, angular patterns.

The windows are apt to be small. We heard of people being burned up because they could not get out through the windows when the house was on fire and the doorway

1 Thomas and Znaniecki, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, vol. i, p. 368.

2 Ibid., vol. ii, p. 50.

cut off. But this defect is not confined to Croatia. It was among the Slovaks that a priest told us that he preached against windows so small that it made an eclipse of the sun if a hen flew in," a figure of speech suggestive in more ways than one.

The cattle are often accommodated under the same roof with the family, either on the same level, only separated by a partition, or underneath in a sort of basement stall.1

The enormous contrast between such home conditions and the immigrant's new surroundings in New York, Chicago, or any other large city, is obvious. The contrast with conditions in a smaller American city like Fall River, Wilkesbarre, or Pueblo is hardly less sharp. Not all our immigrants, even in recent years, are peasants, nor do all enter cities. The great bulk of first arrivals, however, do go to the cities. The people they know from their own country or their own village live there, and they follow the trail of their friends.

One important group from which we draw immigrants, the Jews, has been accustomed for centuries to city dwelling or at least to occupations characteristic of urban life. Jews, however, come to America from small towns as well as from large cities; Mr. Ravage shows us the contrast between New York City and the Rumanian village of his boyhood.2

...

This remarkable country, so newly discovered for us, was infinitely more wonderful than it had appeared from first reports, and infinitely more puzzling. It was regrettable that we had learned this only after Couza had gone, or we might have asked him to explain how it was managed. We might also have been told in an authorita

1 Emily Balch, Our Slavic Fellow Citizens, p. 164.

M. E. Ravage, An American in the Making, pp. 29-30.

tive way whether it was true that in New York the railways ran over the roofs of houses, that the dwellings were so large that one of them was sufficient to house an entire town in Rumania, that all the food was sold in sealed metal packages, that the water came up into people's homes without having to be carried, and that no one, even a shoemaker, went to the temple on Saturdays without wearing a stovepipe hat.

The important point for us is to discover what dif ferences between the immigrant's conditions here and abroad have a real bearing upon his health in this country, and so upon American policies and methods of medical or health work. Consideration of these conditions discloses seven points of importance.

PUBLIC VERSUS PRIVATE HEALTH ADMINISTRATION

Although some continental countries have a welldeveloped system of public health administration in their cities, the people in the villages do not come in contact with it. Hygiene is determined either by personal decision or by custom. The only public control in health matters experienced by the peasant is the regulation of matters of birth, sickness, water and milk supply, by family or district custom.

"In the city," said the little boy in the story, "you get your milk from a cart, but in the country it squirts from a cow." The peasant was familiar with the immediate sources of milk supply in cow or goat. The sanitary supervision and control of the milk supply thus remained with the individual or the family and did not become a matter of public health administration. Also the disposal of refuse was wholly a family matter. Garbage might be fed to the pigs.