ITALIAN AND OTHER LATIN IMMIGRANTS. 345 



The average stature of Italians is very much below the medium, 

 but, nevertheless, they are wiry and muscular and capable of prolonged 

 physical exertion. The country-bred Italian bears the insanitary con- 

 ditions of the tenement houses very badly. He succumbs to disease 

 as a result of tenement house conditions more readily than the Hebrew, 

 who for generations has been a dweller in the crowded insanitary dis- 

 tricts of large towns and cities, and has acquired a certain degree of 

 resisting power against diseases due to overcrowding, filth and lack of 

 pure air and sunlight. Italian children reared in the Italian quarter 

 of New York, Boston, Philadelphia or Chicago are prone to tubercular 

 disease and rickets, and compare unfavorably with children brought 

 up in Sicily or Italy. Consumption is frequent among tenement -house 

 Italians, although extremely rare in recently arrived immigrants. 



Mentally the Italian immigrant is what might be expected of peas- 

 antry whose average illiteracy is 48 per cent. However, the possibili- 

 ties of the Italian peasant, properly educated, are very promising. 

 They are very quick to learn, have a deftness of hand which adapts 

 them to trades requiring manual skill, and their artistic sense is al- 

 ways developed, though it sometimes does violence to the esthetic color 

 sense of hyper-critical Americans. 



The moral standard of the Italian family is very high, and Italian 

 women are deservedly noted for the homely virtues, which make 

 womanhood, of whatever nationality, revered. 



The crimes charged to the Italians are usually crimes of violence, 

 actuated by revenge for real or fancied wrongs. These are outgrowths 

 of the custom of taking the law in their own hands in a country where 

 the poor had little or no redress from the law. But in the aggregate 

 of crime the Italian, by reason of his sobriety, presents a better record 

 in this country than many of the races commonly classed as desirable. 

 The Italian seldom becomes a public charge, because of his willing- 

 ness to work at any kind of labor that offers. He does not become 

 pauperized. He applies for and receives charity less often than many 

 of our other city-dwelling immigrants. He is frugal and, in spite of 

 the robbery to which he is subjected by padrone or banker, manages to 

 save some of his earnings. If he has no other prospect, when winter, 

 lack of work and poverty stare him in the face, he usually has the 

 price of steerage passage to Italy, and migrates to reappear at some 

 more opportune season. This migratory tendency of the Italian 

 laborer has caused a great deal of comment upon his value to the 

 country. There is little doubt that the Italian goes back and forth 

 between Europe and America more than any other people. They 

 have earned the title of 'birds of passage' by their habit of flitting 

 back and forth and have been accused of sending vast sums of money 

 home and, in many instances, of going home to live in luxury on the 

 money they earned in America. 



