CITY LIFE, CRIME AND POVERTY 133 



of the struggle for existence, and are shut up during the day- 

 time in shops and factories. On the streets and alleys, and in 

 their gangs and in the schools the children evade parental dis- 

 cipline, and for them the home is practically nonexistent. 

 Says a well informed student of race problems in New York: 

 "Example after example might be given of tenement house 

 families in which the parents — industrious peasant laborers — 

 have found themselves disgraced by idle and vicious grown 

 sons and daughters. Cases taken from the records of chari- 

 table societies almost at random show these facts again and 

 again." 



Far different is it with those foreigners who settle in coun- 

 try districts where their children are under their constant over- 

 sight and, while the youngsters are learning the ways of Amer- 

 ica, they are also held by their parents to industrious habits. 

 Children of such immigrants become substantial citizens, while 

 children of the same race brought up in the cities become a 

 recruiting constituency for hoodlums, vagabonds and crimi- 

 nals. 



The reader must have observed in the preceding statistical 

 estimates the startling preeminence of the negro in the ranks 

 of criminals. His proportion of prisoners for adult males 

 seems to be five times as great as that of the native stock, and 

 nearly twice as great as that of foreign parentage, while for 

 boys his portion in the north Atlantic states is eleven times as 

 great as that of the corresponding native stock, and nearly 

 four times as great as that of foreign parentage. 



The negro perhaps suffers by way of discrimination in the 

 number of arrests and convictions compared with the whites, . 

 yet it is significant that in proportion to total numbers the 

 negro prisoners in the northern states are nearly twice as many 

 as in the southern states, reaching the enormous proportion of 

 20,000 to the million of voting age in the north Atlantic states, 

 but standing at less than 12,000 in the southern states. Here 

 again city life works its degenerating effects, for the northern 

 negroes are congregated mainly in towns and cities, while the 

 southern negroes remain in the country. 



Did space permit, it would prove an interesting quest to 

 follow the several races through the various classes of crimes, 



