This was the period when, according to Gen. F. A. Walker, the average immigrant was "enterprising, thrifty, alert, adventurous, and courageous." A contemporary writer anticipated General Walker's parallel between the oid and the new immigration in almost identical language.

I

A generation later it is again reported that "the poor and the productive classes of Europe, by hundreds of thousands, have been, and are now coming to our shores, with fixed habits and modes of life. These now constitute, mainly, the army of our unskilled laborers, are ignorant and degraded, pitifully so."2

Regarding the standard of living of the Irish peasantry at the beginning of the Irish exodus to America, when, according to General Walker's "rightful presumption, the average immigrant was thrifty and had accumulated the necessary means to pay his way, we have the following description from the same authority:

The conditions under which they had been born and brought up were generally of the most squalid and degrading character. Their wretched hovels, thatched with rotting straw, scantily furnished with light, hardly ventilated at all, frequently with no floor but the clay on which they were built, were crowded beyond the bounds of comfort, health, or, as it would seem to us, of simple social decency; their beds were heaps of straw or rags; their food consisted mainly of buttermilk and potatoes, often of the worst, and commonly inadequate in amount; their clothing was scanty and shabby.3

*" Then our accessions of immigration were real accessions of strength from the ranks of the learned and the good, from enlightened mechanic and artisan and intelligent husbandman. Now, immigration is the Bession of weakness, from the ignorant and vicious, or the priest

dden slaves of Ireland and Germany, or the outcast tenants of the poorhouses and prisons of Europe."-From a paper entitled "Imminent Dangers to the Institutions of the United States through Foreign Immigration," etc., by S. F. B. Morse, 1835.— H. R. Sixty-first Congress. Hearings before the Committee on Immigration, p. 327.

* Report of the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor, 1869–1870, D.MM.

Walker, loc. cit., p. 451. The following is quoted elsewhere by the game author from the report of Earl Devon's Commission on Irish Poverty in the 40's: "In many districts, their daily food is the potato;

Congestion was a common evil in those days, as it is to-day, and the reason for it was sought in the fact that the Irish immigrant, born in a cabin or a garret, had been used to crowding at home.' The New York Weekly Tribune of May 2, 1846, discussing a strike of Irish laborers in Brooklyn, said that their earnings were hardly sufficient to pay the rent of a decent tenement, so "they were allowed to build miserable shanties on ground allotted them by the contractors on the plot occupied by them in performing the work." A quarter of a century later the dwellings of the Irish immigrants in Boston were officially characterized as “sickening kennels."3 Says Dr. Kate H. Claghorn, comparing the old immigration with the new: "No account of filth in daily surroundings among Italians and Hebrews can outmatch the pictures drawn by observers of the habits of immigrant Irish and even Germans. "4

The living conditions in an Irish district in 1864 were thus described by a city inspector:

The tenants seem to wholly disregard personal cleanliness, if not the very first principles of decency, their general appearance and actions corresponding with their wretched abodes. This indifference to personal and domiciliary cleanliness is doubtless acquired from a long

their only beverage water; their cabins are seldom a protection against the weather; a bed or a blanket is a rare luxury; and, in nearly all, their pig and manure heap constitute their only property."-Francis A. Walker: Political Economy, pp. 313-314. "In the 40's, at the time of the potato famine in Ireland, many of the thousands who came to this country were in serious danger of absolute starvation if they remained at home. Practically none of our immigrants of the present day are in such a condition."-Jenks and Lauck: The Immigration Problem, p. 12.

1 A contemporary writer had "seen in Ireland a horse, two cows, two goats, grandmother, father and mother, brother and sisters, an infant in a cradle, all in one apartment."-Report of the Industrial Commission, vol. xv., p. 459.

2

* Documentary History of American Industrial Society, vol. viii., pp. 225-226.

3 Report of the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor, 1869–70, p. 88.

• Report of the Industrial Commission, vol. xv., p. 491.

familiarity with the loathsome surroundings, wholly at variance with all moral or social improvements.1

A gloomy picture of the moral effects of bad housing conditions in the foreign sections of New York City in 1878, when the immigrants were only Irish and Germans, was drawn in a report of the Association for the Improvement of the Condition of the Poor:

In many quarters of the city family life and the feeling of home are almost unknown; people live in great caravansaries, which are hot and stifling in summer, disagreeable in winter, and where children associate together in the worst way. In many rooms privacy and purity are unattainable, and young girls grow up accustomed to immodesty from their earliest years. Boys herd together in gangs, and learn the practices of crime and vice before they are out of childhood. Even the laborers' families who occupy separate rooms in these buildings have no sense of home."

Dr. Griscom, as early as 1842, had called attention to the "depraved effects which such modes of life exert upon the moral feelings and habits"; and the city inspector in 1851 remarks that these overpopulated houses are generally, if not always, seminaries of filthiness, indecency, and lawlessness."3

Dr. Claghorn concludes her review of the housing conditions of the former generations of immigrants with the following remarks:

The newer immigrants arrive here at no lower social level, to say the least, than did their predecessors. Their habits of life, their general morality and intelligence can not be called decidedly inferior. . . . The Italian ragpicker was astonishingly like his German predecessor, and the Italian laborer is of quite as high a type as the Irish laborer of a generation ago. In some cases the newer immigrants have brought about positive improvements in the quarters they have entered. Whole blocks have been transferred from nests of pauperism and vice into quiet industrial neighborhoods by the incoming of Italians and Hebrews.

Throughout the nineteenth century relief against city

* Report of the Industrial Commission, p. 456. 3 Loc. cit., p. 458.

2 Ibid.,

P. 459.

A Loc. cit., p. 491.

poverty was sought in directing the current of immigration to the farm. As early as 1817, "the same anxiety was felt that is felt to-day to get the immigrant out of the 'crowded' cities into the country beyond." In 1819, the managers of the Society for the Prevention of Pauperism of the City of New York favored the plan of establishing "communication . . . with our great farmers and landholders in the interior" with a view to provide "ways and means . . . for the transportation of able-bodied foreigners into the interior," where labor could be provided for them "upon the soil." Forty years later the Association for the Improvement of the Condition of the Poor complained of the Irish immigrants that "they had an utter distaste for felling ✔ forests and turning up the prairies for themselves. They preferred to stay where another race would furnish them with food, clothing, and labor, and hence were mostly found loitering on the lines of the public works, in villages, and in the worst portions of the large cities where they competed with negroes . . . for the most degrading employments."3 The old immigrants, like those of the present generation, were mostly unskilled laborers and farm hands, as willappear from an analysis of Table 2 next following. 4

3 Report of the A. I. C. P., 1860, p. 50. Quoted from Report of the Industrial Commission, vol. xv., p. 462.

♦ For annual averages and sources of information see Appendix, Table I.

The sharp fluctuations of the percentages of agricultural workers and common laborers indicate that the distinction between farm laborers and other laborers was probably not very accurately drawn in our immigration statistics. For the period 1901-1910 it is possible to subdivide all persons engaged in agricultural pursuits into farmers and farm laborers, the former constituting 1.6 per cent and the latter 23.0 per cent of all immigrant breadwinners.

Allowing the same percentage for the decade next preceding, with a rising tide of immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe, and estimating the maximum proportion of farmers in the "old immigration" at one half of all incoming agricultural workers, we arrive at the following comparative ratios for unskilled laborers and farm help combined.

I

The ratio of unskilled laborers and farm hands to the total number of breadwinners exhibits but little change 'during the whole fifty-year period. For the half-century beginning in 1820, the proportion of unskilled laborers, exclusive of those classified under agricultural pursuits, has been computed as 46.6 per cent,2 i. e., about the same as for the later period.

This is vastly more than is claimed for the "old immigration" by Professors Jenks and Lauck in their unofficial summary of the reports of the Immigration Commission, wherein they say that "the percentage of farmers as distinguished from farm laborers has always been very small, so small as not to be an appreciable factor in determining our civilization."-Jenks and Lauck, loc. cit., p. 31.

2

Political Science Quarterly, March, 1904; Roland P. Falkner: Some Aspects of the Immigration Problem, p. 49.