594 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1909. 
grants practically driven out from Europe by political persecution. 
Thus, in 1905, Russia sent 50,000 women folk—more than came from 
England, Sweden, and Germany combined, and Austria-Hungary 
sent 78,000, or thrice the number of women contributed by England, 
Ireland, and Germany. But of the main body the large majority 
are men. This vanguard of males tends, generally, to be followed 
by more women later, after an initial period of trial and explora- 
tion. Thus, among the Italians the proportion of men to women, 
once six to one, has now fallen to about three to one. Having estab- 
lished themselves in America, what are these men to do for wives? 
In all classes matrimony, early or late, is man’s natural estate. They 
may write home or go home and find brides among their own people, 
or they may seek their wives in America. This probably the ma- 
jority of them do, and, of course, most of these naturally prefer to 
marry within their own colony of fellow countrymen. But suppose, 
in the first place, this colony is predominantly men, or constitutes 
a small outpost, isolated among a population alien or semialien to 
them. An odd consequence of the ambition to rise of these foreign- 
born men, tending inevitably to break down racial barriers, is that 
they covet an American-born wife. The woman always is the con- 
servative element in society, and tends to cling to the old ways long 
after they have been discarded by the men. The result is that in 
intermixture of various peoples it is more commonly the man who 
marries up in the social scale. Being the active agent, he inclines 
to choose from a social station higher than his own. There were 
about 15,000,000 people in 1900 born in the United States of foreign- 
born parents, wholly or in part. About 5,000,000 of these had one 
parent foreign born and one native born; that is to say, with one 
parent drawn from the second generation of the immigrant stream. 
And in two-thirds of these mixed marriages it was the father who 
was foreign born, the mother being native born. This law I have 
verified by many concrete examples and by some additional statis- 
tical data. It is the same law which, contrary to general belief, leads 
most of the infrequent marriages across the color line to take the 
form of a negro husband and a white wife. For certain States, as 
in Michigan, the registration statistics are reliable, and here again 
show that over two-thirds of the mixed marriages have foreign-born 
grooms and native-born brides. At the United Hebrew Charities 
in New York City many thousand cases of destitution among for- 
eign-born women arise from the desertion of the wife, with her old- 
fashioned European ways, by the husband, who has outdistanced her 
in adaptation to the new life. This law is well borne out in the 
growing intermarriage between the Irish and the Italians. The Irish, 
from their longer residence in America, are obviously of a higher 
social grade. The ambitious young Italian fruit vender or the 
