596 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1909. 
Despite the best efforts of parents to keep alive an acquaintance 
with the mother tongue, it tends to disappear in the second genera- 
tion. To be sure at the present time no less than about 1 in every 
16 of our entire population, according to the census of 1900, can 
not even speak the English language. Such ignorance of English 
of course tends strongly to persist in isolated rural communities. 
The Pennsylvania Dutch, who still, after over two hundred years of 
residence in America, can say “Ich habe mein Haus ge-painted and 
ge-whitewashed,” are a case in point. It is averred that in some of 
the Polish colonies in Texas even the negroes speak Polish, as 
Swedish is used in Minnesota and the Dakotas, German in the long- 
standing Swiss colonies in Wisconsin, and French among the French- 
Canadians in New England. On Cape Cod, in Massachusetts, many 
rural schools have a separate room for the non-English speaking 
pupils. But the desire, and even economic necessity, of learning 
English is overwhelming in its potency. In the transitional period 
of acquiring English the dependence of the parents upon the chil- 
dren entirely reverses the customary relationship. Even the young 
children, having learned English in the public schools, are indis- 
pensable go-betweens for all intercourse with the public. As a 
result they relegate the parents to a subordinate position before the 
world. Census enumerators and college-settlement workers agree 
in citing instances where the old people are commanded to “shut 
up” and not interfere in official conversations; or, in the familiar 
admonition, “not to speak until spoken to.” The decadence of 
family authority and coherence due to this cause is indubitable. 
Thus it comes about that already in the second generation the bar- 
riers of language and religion against ethnic intermixture are every- 
where breaking down. The English tongue readily comes into serv- 
ice, but, unfortunately, in respect to religion, the traditional props 
and safeguards are knocked from under, without as yet, in too many 
instances, suitable substitutes of any sort being provided. From this 
fact arises the insistence of the problem of criminality among the 
descendants of our. foreign born. This is a topic of vital importance, 
but somewhat foreign to the particular subject in hand. 
Among the influences tending to hinder ethnic intermixture, there 
remains to be mentioned the effect of concentration or segregation 
of the immigrants in compact colonies, which remain to all intents 
and purposes as truly outposts of the mother civilization as were 
Carthage or Treves. This phenomenon of concentration of our for- 
eign born, not only in the large cities, but in the northeastern quarter 
of the United States, has become increasingly noticeable with the de- 
scending scale of nationality among the more recent immigrants. The 
Teutonic peoples have scattered widely, taking up land in the West 
and thus populating the wilderness. But the Mediterranean, Slavic, 
