1 66 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



THE AGRICULTURAL DISTRIBUTION OF IMMIGRANTS. 



By ROBERT DeC. WARD, 



CAMBRIDGE, MASS. 



MANY of the evils resulting from the enormous immigration of 

 aliens into this country during recent years have been much 

 aggravated by the congestion of these aliens in the slums of our large 

 northern cities. For this reason, most of those who have studied the 

 immigration problem seriously have come to the conclusion that if these 

 immigrants could be removed from the slums, and distributed over the 

 agricultural districts of the west and south, all the difficulties which 

 are now met with in educating and Americanizing these foreigners 

 could easily be disposed of. The vastness of the problem of the city 

 slum, and the impossibility, even with unlimited resources of men and 

 money, of permanently raising the standards of living of many of our 

 immigrants as long as they are crowded together, and as long as the 

 stream of newer immigrants pours into these same slums, has naturally 

 forced itself upon the minds of thinking persons. This note was struck 

 in the last Annual Report of the Boston Associated Charities in the 

 following words : " With an immigration as unrestrained as at present, 

 we can have little hope of permanent gain in the struggle for uplifting 

 the poor of our cities, since newcomers are always at hand, ignorant of 

 American standards." And in a recent study of the Chicago Stock 

 Yards strike, in which the miserable conditions are described under 

 which the newer immigrants employed in the yards live, we learn that 

 " from the poorest parts of Bohemia, Poland, Lithuania, and Slavonia, 

 these immigrants have poured in great overlapping waves into the stock 

 yards. The standard of living of each wave rises slowly, constantly 

 sucked down by the lower standards of the waves behind."* 



The fact has become increasingly obvious during the past few years 

 that in the ' Little Italys/ the ' Little Russias,' the ' Little Syrias,' in 

 cur city slums, we are finding more and more difficult and burdensome 

 problems of public and private charity; of police; of education; of 

 religious training; of public health. 



Go down to Little Italy, says a writer of New York, and it is Italy. It has 

 not only its market of Italian foods and other stuffs. It has its Italian feast 

 days and processions and celebrations; and there are thousands of persons there 

 who can hardly know that they have come from Italy. . . . It is a similar 

 story, of course, that has many a time been told about the Ghetto. It differs 



* The italics are the present writer's. 



