THE IMMIGRANT 93 



but are proving their efficiency in vegetable and fruit farming. 

 Of late years such settlements as that of Italians at Tontitown, 

 Arkansas, in the Ozark Mountains, show also that Italians can 

 bring their home industry with them and succeed here. They 

 not only settle down as dignified farmers, but actually teach our 

 farmers many things. Vegetables, apples, plums, grapes, and 

 other fruits are successfully grown. If the colony located at 

 Sunnyside, Arkansas, at an earlier date was a failure at first, it 

 is no sign that Italians cannot succeed in agriculture. Immi- 

 grants, largely from other industries, placed in competition with 

 Negroes in production of a crop that they knew absolutely 

 nothing about, under foremen accustomed to drive slaves, in a 

 swamp country hot and sickly to newcomers attacked by 

 malarial fever and losing a large number of the first settlers, it 

 is not to be wondered at that failure was threatened. But suc- 

 cess has come even in that case, where failure at first stared all 

 in the face. 



With colonies like the Brandsville Swiss settlement in Mis- 

 souri, with the Italians and Russians coming even into old New 

 England, with Mexicans pushing up into the Southwest, and 

 with other nationalities gradually finding their own, we may 

 indeed turn our attention toward the agricultural industry as 

 a much-neglected field. The cry of "back to the land" will not 

 go unheeded by immigrants who have come from farms in their 

 mother-country if any reasonable amount of effort is put forth to 

 "assist them to find themselves." 



Reference might also, be made to the Jewish farm problems of 

 the Middle Atlantic States, problems which have importance as 

 far West as Wisconsin; and to the Japanese and Chinese agri- 

 cultural labor problems of the far West and Southwest. There 

 are possibilities here which few people have yet appreciated. The 

 question of demand for seasonal agricultural labor and the pos- 

 sibilities of continual labor by passing from one industry to 

 another in neighboring districts or following the same industry 

 from one part of the country to another are left untouched. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 



Balch, Emily G. The Peasant Background of Our Slavic Fellow Citi- 

 /ciis. Survey 24 : (5(57-77. August, 1010. 



