IMMIGRATION. 245 



illiterate. It is also necessary to discriminate between the man who is 

 illiterate and the man who is uneducated. A man may be unable to 

 read or write, and yet he may be able to mine coal, or set out grape 

 cuttings, and trim and train the vines. This man is illiterate, but he 

 can not be called uneducated. His illiteracy may be due to causes 

 over which he had no control, as persecution of, or discrimination 

 against, his race by the government under which he lived. The races 

 which have suffered most show a high percentage of illiteracy — the 

 Pole, the Lithuanian, and the Jew. Within seventy-five years of 

 catholic emancipation in Ireland, and the revocation of the penal laws, 

 illiteracy among Irish immigrants dropped from above 50 per cent, to 

 4 per cent. Other races have as great a hunger for education as these 

 Irish, and meet their first opportunity for sending their children to 

 school, after arriving in America. 



Many an Irish immigrant of fifty years ago, who could neither 

 read nor write, and who perhaps could only fix the date of his birth 

 by its proximity to 'the night of the big wind,' became prosperous 

 here, sent his children to school and lived long enough to see them 

 occupy high places in the land of his adoption. 



The Americanization of immigrants who do not speak English will 

 take a longer time than was necessary for the Americanization of im- 

 migrants from Ireland, but time and American schools work wonders, 

 and already the children of poor Eussian Jews of the Ghetto can be 

 pointed out as making their mark in the business or professional 

 world. 



The majority of the immigrants who are illiterate come here to 

 supply the demand for unskilled labor, and the mere fact of being able 

 to read or write in their own language would not aid them one iota 

 in their work or make them one whit more desirable to their employ- 

 ers. There is often expressed a fear of the growing numbers of the 

 illiterate laborers in this country, because of their tendency to social- 

 ism or anarchy. As a matter of fact the illiterate laborer is less dan- 

 gerous from this cause than the discontented laborer of some educa- 

 tion. The illiterate immigrant can only be reached from the public 

 platform and the anarchistic exhorter can be easily suppressed or de- 

 ported, but it is not so easy to prevent the dissemination of anarchistic 

 pamphlets, which sow the seeds of discord and fan the flame of discon- 

 tent in the heart of the laborer who can read. 



Much has been written of the great proportion of criminals and 

 paupers which is made up of aliens. In accepting statements of this 

 character, it is well to take into consideration the fact that position in 

 life has much to do with the tendency to commit crime, and that our 

 immigrants necessarily begin life at the lowest rung of the ladder. 

 Paupers and criminals will ever come in the greatest proportion from 



