CHAPTER I 

 THE SURPLUS PEOPLE 



THE settlement of the United States has been largely 

 a story of foreign immigration. While the movement 

 of population from the Old World to the New has not 

 ceased, the settlement of new areas during the coming 

 century will be in marked degree a movement of do- 

 mestic immigration. Foreign population no longer set- 

 tles extensively upon the agricultural lands of the West. 

 It remains in the cities of the seaboard, making New 

 York, Philadelphia, and San Francisco cosmopolitan 

 communities, and submerging the Puritan traditions of 

 Boston under a wave of Celtic dominance. It fills the 

 coal-mining districts of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Illinois 

 with Hungarian and Bohemian laborers. It replaces the 

 native artisans of New England manufacturing towns 

 with Canadians, Italians, and Armenians. It swells the 

 population of the Lake Cities, such as Buffalo, Cleve- 

 land, Detroit, Chicago, and Milwaukee. It is thus that 

 the strong current of foreign immigration, which had a 

 large part in making the Middle West and gave a pow- 

 erful impulse to the growth of interior cities, expends 

 itself in these days. 



There is a surplus population chiefly in cities and 

 towns east of the Mississippi river. While much has 



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