246 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the tenement dwellers of our crowded cities. The unfortunates, re- 

 gardless of race, who are exposed to the hardships of the tenement and 

 temptations of the slum, may be expected to furnish the largest pro- 

 portion of inmates for our penal and charitable institutions. Statis- 

 tics comparing the tendency to pauperism and criminality of the for- 

 eign born with that of natives, are apt to be misleading. These 

 statistics almost invariably fail to take account of the predominating 

 influence of sex and age upon crime. It can be demonstrated that the 

 vast majority of criminals are of the male sex and between the ages of 

 20 and 45 years. The males exceed the females among immigrants 

 in the proportion of 2.5 to 1, and about 75 per cent, are between the 

 ages of 15 to 40. Persons less than 15 seldom are criminals and the 

 immense number of natives below that age contribute few to the num- 

 ber of criminals, but help greatly to reduce the criminal average in 

 the total native population. The great majority of immigrants, on 

 the other hand, are of the sex and age which predispose to crime. It 

 is also a fact that before our laws were made strict, and rigidly en- 

 forced, thousands of paupers, cripples and criminals were shipped 

 here from Europe, and the effect of these upon our institutional sta- 

 tistics can be imagined, but should not be charged to the immigrant 

 of to-day. 



Even if the immigrant could be eliminated from our social prob- 

 lem, Utopia would not be with us. The lowly place now occupied by 

 the foreign born, the lowest stratum of our social formation, would 

 still exist, and would then be made up of urban degenerates or native 

 failures from the rural districts. Idealists seem to think that the im- 

 migrant is wholly responsible for the slum with its crime and pauper- 

 ism. The responsibility for the slum can be divided between money- 

 grasping property owners and an indifferent puerile civic administra- 

 tion. The immigrant finds the tenements and the slums already estab- 

 lished when he arrives and is the victim and not the cause of them. 



The tendency of foreign-born towards cities, as places of perma- 

 nent residence, is a well-known and widely discussed social problem. 

 The real distribution of our immigrants is merely indicated by the 

 destination given by newly-arrived aliens at Ellis Island, and the more 

 accurate knowledge of their places of residence here is given by the 

 United States census returns. Immigrants at Ellis Island may give 

 New York as their destination, yet after a short time go to Wisconsin, 

 Texas or Louisiana. Others destined for the far west may never pro- 

 ceed farther than the Atlantic seaboard, but the United States census 

 finds them in their permanent homes, wherever they may be, from 

 Maine to California, from Alaska to Florida. This tendency of the 

 foreign born to crowd our large cities is not of recent development. 

 It has been the case ever since our cities attained great size. The 



