17© POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



There is a misleading idea in certain quarters that 'the agricultural dis- 

 tribution of Italian immigrants ' should be obtained simply through the 

 employment of a large number of Italians as farm workers and farm hands. 

 This would be only a palliative measure. The character of agricultural work 

 is, by its very nature, precarious. The Italian immigrants would thus find 

 employment during a few months of the year, when, for instance, at harvest 

 time, there is an enormous demand for labor. . . . But after a comparatively 

 short period of occupation they would lapse into enforced idleness, which would 

 undoubtedly drive them back to the industrial centers. The only way to get 

 at the root of the question is to transform a large portion of our immigrants 

 into landowners or farmers. 



To transform ignorant laborers, with but a few dollars in their pos- 

 session, into landowners, is not a matter of a day or a year. It in- 

 volves an expenditure of time and money. It is a matter of the 

 assimilation of the immigrant and of the elevation of his standards of 

 living. Thus, neither the interests of those states which desire immi- 

 grants who shall at once buy their land, nor the best interests of the 

 Italian immigrants themselves, as set forth by Mr. Tosti, are met in a 

 wholesale distribution of ignorant farm laborers. The difficulty of 

 having large numbers of farm laborers in idleness for much of the time, 

 to which Mr. Tosti also refers, is already present, as may be seen in the 

 following statement, clipped from a newspaper of last summer: 



Several of the largest planters in the delta have made contracts with the 

 labor agencies in New York to secure for them gangs of Italian immigrants, 

 who are now being brought south by the coach load. . . . The Italian laborers 

 who are now being imported will not have very much to do until the cotton- 

 picking season opens, and the immigrants will be maintained by the planters 

 in comparative idleness until picking begins. 



4. Do the Country Districts want the Kind of Immigrants whom 

 it is proposed to send to them? — No distribution of our immigrants 

 should be thought of if the states to which they are to be sent do not 

 welcome them. A few years ago, the U. S. Immigration Investigating 

 Commission asked the governors of the different states what national- 

 ities of immigrants they desired, and in only two cases was any desire 

 expressed for Slavs, Latins, Jews or Asiatics, and both of these two 

 cases related to Italian farmers, with money, intending to become per- 

 manent settlers. A canvass of the same kind, made within six months 

 by some gentlemen who are interested in the distribution scheme, 

 showed that these preferences have undergone no appreciable change. 

 In every case, in this recent canvass, the officials protested against the 

 shipment of southern and eastern Europeans from the city slums into 

 their states. In the south to-day, owing to the lessened efficiency of 

 the negro, the greater demand for field laborers, and the movement 

 from the country into the towns, the need of pickers in the cotton 

 fields is very great in some sections, and the demand for vast hordes 



