EUROPEANS IN UNITED STATES—RIPLEY. 591 
statistically, constitute about one-quarter of the whole; in Massa- 
chusetts the proportion is about one-third, and occasionally, as in 
North Dakota in 1890, it approaches one-half (42 per cent). It is 
in the cities, of course, where this proportion of actual foreigners 
rises highest. In New York City there are over 2,000,000 people born 
in Europe who have come there hoping to better their lots in life. 
Boston has an even higher proportion of actual foreigners; but the 
relatively larger number of English-speaking ones, such as the Irish, 
renders the phenomenon less striking. Nevertheless, within a few 
blocks, in the foreign colony, there are no less than twenty-five dis- 
tinct nationalities. In this entire district, once the fashionable 
quarter of Boston, out of 28,000 inhabitants, only 1,500 in 1895 had 
parents born in the United States. 
The full measure of our ethnic diversity is revealed only when one 
aggregates the actually foreign born with their children born in 
America—totalizing, as we call it, the foreign born and the native 
born of foreign parentage. This group thus includes only the first 
generation of American descent. Oftentimes even the second genera- 
tion may remain ethnically as undefiled as the first, but our positive 
statistical data carries us no farther. This group of foreign born 
and their children constitutes to-day upward of one-third of our total 
population; and, by excluding the negroes, it equals almost one-half 
(46 per cent) of the white population. This is for the country as a 
whole. Considered by States or cities, the proportion is, of course, 
much higher. Baltimore, one of our purest American cities, had 
40 per cent of foreigners, with their children, in 1900. In Boston 
the proportion leaps to 70 per cent, in New York to 80 per cent, and 
reaches a maximum in Milwaukee with 86 per cent thus constituted. 
Picture to yourselves, if you please, an English city of the size of 
Edinburgh with only about one person in eight English by descent, 
by only a modest two generations! To this condition must be added 
the probability that not over one-half of that remnant of a rear guard 
can trace its descent on American soil as far back as the third genera- 
tion. Were we to eliminate these foreigners and their children from 
our city populations, it has been estimated that Chicago, with to-day 
a population of over 2,000,000, would dwindle to a city of not much 
over 100,000 inhabitants. 
One may select great industries practically given over to foreigners. 
Over 90 per cent of the tailors of New York City are Jews, mainly 
Russian and Polish. In Massachusetts, the center of our staple cotton 
manufacture, out of 98,000 employees one finds that only 3,900, or 
~about 4 per cent, are native-born Americans, and most of those are of 
Irish or Scotch-Irish descent two generations back. All of our day 
labor, once Irish, is now Italian; our fruit venders, once Italian, are 
now becoming Greek; and our coal mines, once manned by peoples 
