6 Hattie Plum Williams 
to the Pacific coast. Aside from this shifting population there is 
a large stable nucleus connected with the business and industrial 
life of the city, and this is being constantly increased as the people 
rise in the social scale and leave vacant places in unskilled labor 
for the raw immigrant to fill. Thus Lincoln, on account of its 
location, furnishes every type of Russian German from the 
wealthy lumber merchant who came among the first immigrants 
a generation ago to the most recent arrival from Russia who ekes 
out a scanty living at street sweeping or at work on the railroad 
section. 
Moreover, Lincoln furnishes an example of the influence of a 
semi-rural environment upon an immigrant group, a phase of the 
subject which is seldom treated. Conditions are a cross between 
city and country, the immigrants being segregated, as in the urban 
communities of the east, and subject to the political exploitation 
and the municipal neglect common to great cities. In the forma- 
tion of educational and political ideals, the influence of Lincoln 
differs materially from the influence of the country districts in 
Nebraska where the Russian Germans live; while in industry it 
partakes more of the nature of a rural locality. On first thought, 
the circumstances under which the immigant lives in such a com- 
munity as Lincoln would be pronounced ideal, but in spite of the 
possibilities which it offers, the relation which exists between the 
city and its “foreign colonies” is much the same as in the larger 
cities, and reproduces their immigrant “problem” in miniature. 
At every period in American history there has been an immi- 
grant group which has been at the bottom of the social scale. In 
the colonies, it was the Germans who were feared, despised, and 
ridiculed. The officials of Pennsylvania were apprehensive lest 
the government should fall into the hands of these aliens whom 
Benjamin Franklin is said to have described as “ rude boors”’ and 
whom the people nicknamed “ Dutch.” Later, the Irish enjoyed 
the same prominence, but they are now displaced by the Italians 
and the Russian Jews. Every community, too, has its foreign 
outcasts, and those who are accounted aristocrats in one section of 
the country are anathematized in another. For example, in 
Pennsylvania where there are so many Slav races congregated at 
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