ited as health agencies. So far as can be ascertained, they are of a transitory character, reaching a limited number of immigrants. The benefit too often provides funeral flowers when it might have gone for the medical care which would have prevented the necessity for flowers. When it is designated for sickness it too often fails to gain its end, either because it is inadequate in amount or because the type of doctor provided is unacceptable to the patient. Last of all, the small benefit societies are often on an unsound actuarial basis and are thus doomed to failure or excessive handicap in competition with the larger societies or commercial insurance companies. From these facts it is apparent that they can play no large or influential part in medical care of the immigrant.

ADVANTAGE IN FRIENDLY ASSISTANCE

If the preponderance of the evidence is not in favor of the small benefit society, some of its advantages must not be overlooked. Its required medical examination often affords an initiation into American health practices and standards that might not otherwise be accomplished for some time. It certainly tends to introduce the minimum standard of health and hygiene which prevails in this country. Furthermore, it accustoms the newcomer to a voluntary healthinsurance plan. This particular plan might prove unsound, but the habit of depending on some form of insurance would be established.

In addition, it is fair to assume that belonging to a benefit society made up of friends and fellow countrymen, gives to many of its members a sense of

assurance and security which the stranger too often lacks. If the mutual-benefit society can bridge the first period of uncertainty and adjustment it will not be a wholly negligible quantity. Its tangible accomplishments are not always apparent, but the friendly offices it performs in times of trouble have an influence in adapting the foreign born to American ways of doing things.

VI

IMMIGRANT BACKGROUNDS

SOME health officers declare that immigrants love to live in dirt. A housing inspector is said once to have complained that immigrants stored coal in the bathtubs when they happened to be in a tenement with "modern conveniences." This story was probably true somewhere and sometime. But it has been told many times and almost everywhere. Some health workers say immigrants are suspicious, set in their ways, if not stubborn. Many declare them to be densely ignorant of hygiene and unwilling to use facilities for medical care or health service, even when such are offered.

Stories of this kind about the immigrant have been multiplied, but after all discounts are made there remains a kernel of truth in the complaint that the immigrant frequently increases the problem of sanitation, that he and his family do not respond to suggestions so quickly or so completely as the American health worker would like.

Our task is not to distribute praise or blame. It is to state facts, to understand conditions, and then determine, if we can, how conditions can be made more as we wish them. We can hardly know conditions, and we can never comprehend the reasons for them, unless we know the immigrants as well as their

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.