37« 



POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



seen by comparing the Italian figures 

 with those of the entire population. 

 Mr. Shipley would make them five 

 times as homicidal as the average, 

 while the ratio in the third column is 

 as three to seven. 



Mr. Shipley perhaps realized this dis- 

 turbing factor, though he does not men- 

 tion it; for he goes out of his way to 

 impugn the character of the immigrants' 

 children, by quoting statistics according 

 to which more than half the children 

 brought before the New York City 

 Children's Court are of Russian or 

 Italian parentage. As homicide is 

 expressly excluded from the jurisdic- 

 tion of that court, the use of these sta- 

 tistics might seem irrelevant; but since 

 the prejudice created might have some 

 indirect influence upon the reader's 

 judgment, I present an analysis of the 

 report of that court for 1905, which is 

 fuller than the earlier ones and in 

 many ways might be more disad- 

 vantageous to the immigrant. In this 

 analysis, the most serious interpreta- 

 tion has been given in doubtful cases, 

 and yet it will be seen that the great 

 majority of arrests are for trivial 

 offenses, such as selling papers without 



a badge, breaking flowers in the parks, 

 throwing stones in the street, etc., in- 

 cidental rather to unguarded childhood 

 than to viciousness. Over one quarter 

 of the arrests have nothing to do with 

 the child's character, as they are for 

 improper guardianship or violation of 

 the child labor law — further comment 

 seems superfluous. 



Finally, Mr. Shipley is not happy in 

 his discussion of the conditions in in- 

 dividual cities; to follow him from 

 town to town, however, would be 

 tedious and would frequently result in 

 a mere repetition of strictures already 

 made upon his general inferences. We 

 can take his comparison of Cleveland 

 and Cincinnati, upon which he lays 

 great stress, as an illuminative ex- 

 ample. It appears that these two Ohio 

 cities, of nearly equal size, present 

 diverse conditions of nationality, Cleve- 

 land containing 46.1 per cent of for- 

 eign-born, among whom more than one 

 third come from southern and eastern 

 Europe, while Cincinnati has only 17.8 

 per cent, foreign-born inhabitants, 

 something more than one tenth of whom 

 come from southeastern Europe. " In 

 Cleveland, the average of arrests for 



Table II. 



Classification of the arraignments before the Children's Court, New York 

 City, in 1905, according to the gravity of the charges and the nationality of 

 the children. The report furnishes no data of the nativity of the parents of 

 children born here, but it is evident that the parents of American-born children 

 must have been in this country at least ten years where offenses of a heinous 

 character are involved. 



