342 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



indulgence in the most degraded and perverted appetites are growing 

 daily more pronounced and more offensive.' 



There would seem to be a disposition to regard such moral dete- 

 rioration as the result of the prevalent squalor and overcrowding, but 

 it is to be noted that the conditions in which these people live in 

 New York at the present day are superior to those to which most of 

 the immigrants were accustomed before they came, and are much 

 better than those which they find in our other large cities or in Lon- 

 don. The squalor and overcrowding, though conspicuous because of 

 the extent of the 'Ghetto,' is much less pronounced than in the 

 Italian, Syrian or Greek quarters, and the household regime of the 

 poorest Jews gains by comparison with the family life of other for- 

 eigners in the tenement districts. 



Moral deterioration may be pointed out in the case of every foreign 

 element that has come to this country, just as it may be among the 

 country-bred youth of our own population who feel in new abodes loss 

 of personal identity and exemption from former moral restraints. In 

 the case of foreigners there is added also a loss of parental control 

 through the greater facility with which children identify themselves 

 with the language and customs of the new environment and by what 

 passes for the process of 'becoming Americanized,' the younger Jews 

 come to look with indifference and even contempt upon the precepts 

 which have safeguarded their race through a troublous past. 



After all, when it is considered that the Jews have been estimated 

 as constituting one fourth of the population of Manhattan, it may 

 be questioned whether evidence of moral degradation may not have 

 attracted attention because it was unexpected rather than because it 

 is unproportionally prevalent. 



In a great measure the poverty to be found in the 'Ghetto' is 

 due to disease or lack of physical strength. Jewish immigrants of 

 a military age who could pass our army requirements for recruits are 

 comparatively rare, while few of their fellow immigrants, the Poles, 

 would fail to pass such a test. Among the Jews also, senile decay 

 is pronounced at an age when the German, Englishman or Scandi- 

 navian is still in his physical and mental prime. Chronic disease 

 is much more prevalent among the Hebrew than among the Slavic 

 immigrants, and common among the former are diseases rarely if 

 ever seen in the case of the latter. The mental standard of the Jewish 

 immigration fails to offset its physical inferiority when brought into 

 active competition with other elements of our cosmopolitan popula- 

 tion. Physical breakdown comes sooner or later and the ravages of 

 tuberculosis are in evidence to an extent that is quite at variance with 

 old notions of racial insusceptibility to this disease. This state of 



