592 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1909. 
from the British Isles, are now worked by Hungarians, Poles, 
Slavaks, or Finns. <A special study of the linguistic conditions in 
Chicago well illustrates our racial heterogeneity. Among the people 
of that great city—the third in size in the United States—fourteen 
languages are spoken by groups of not less than 10,000 persons each. 
Newspapers are regularly published in ten languages, and church 
services are conducted in twenty different tongues. Measured by the 
size of its foreign linguistic colonies, Chicago is the second Bohemian 
city in the world, the third Swedish, the fourth Polish, and the fifth 
German (New York being the fourth). I know of one large factory 
in Chicago employing 4,200 hands, representing twenty-four distinct 
nationalities. Rules of the establishment are regularly printed in 
eight languages. In one block in New York, where friends of mine 
are engaged in college settlement work, there are 1,400 people of 
twenty distinct nationalities. There are more than two-thirds as 
many native-born Irish in Boston as in the capital city, Dublin. 
With their children, mainly of pure Irish blood, they make Boston 
indubitably the leading Irish city in the world. New York is a 
larger Italian city to-day than Rome, having 500,000 Italian colonists. 
It contains no less than 800,000 Jews, mainly from Russia. Thus it 
is easily the foremost Jewish city in the world. Pittsburg, the center 
of our iron and steel industry, is another Tower of Babel. It is said 
to contain more of that out-of-the-way people, the Servians, than the 
capital of that country itself. 
Such being the ethnic diversity of our population, the primary and 
fundamental physical question is as to whether these racial groups 
are to coalesce to form ultimately a more or less uniform American 
type, or whether they are to continue their separate existences within 
the confines of one political unit. Will the progress of time bring 
about intermixture of these diverse types; or will they remain sepa- 
rate, distinct, and perhaps discordant elements for an indefinite 
period, lke the warring nationalities of Austria-Hungary and the 
Balkan States? We may perhaps best seek an answer by a serial 
discussion, first, of those factors which tend to favor intermixture. 
and thereafter of those forces which operate to prevent it. 
The extreme mobility of our American population, ever on the 
increase, is evidently a solvent force from which powerful results 
may well .be expected in the course of time. This is rendered 
peculiarly patent by the usual concomitant that this mobility is 
largely confined to the male sex. The census of 1900 showed that 
nearly one-quarter of our native-born whites were then living in other 
States than those of their birth. Kansas and Oklahoma are probably 
the most extreme examples of such colonization. Almost their entire 
population has been transplanted, often many times, moving by 
stages from State to State. The last census showed that only 53 
