82 Hattie Plum Williams 
people especially manifest decided disapproval of marriages out- 
side their own group.”* Not infrequently parents bring such 
pressure upon a young man or woman as to induce them to give 
up a proposed union with a foreigner. “ People ought to marry 
the same,” they say, “then they can raise their children alike,” 
meaning that common religious training is necessary to insure the 
proper rearing of offspring. Those who are more liberal in their 
views concerning intermarriage in general, unanimously draw the 
line at the “Irish”; and since this term to them is synonymous 
with Catholic, the opposition really rests as before upon a re- 
ligious basis. 
Another and more reasonable ground for opposing mixed mar- 
riages is the unfortunate outcome of so many of them. Those of 
the lower social class in America who contract such alliances al- 
most invariably marry persons who are inferior in character to 
themselves. Girls who work in hotels or restaurants marry men 
who are cooks and dishwashers or ticket sellers for cheap theaters. 
In a year or two, their home is broken up, the American husband 
deserting his wife and child entirely, or the American woman, as 
the case may be, frequenting the public dance halls and enter- 
taining “strangers” to the ruin of her husband’s purse and the 
neglect of all her wifely duties. A young girl who married an 
American dishwasher in the Chinese restaurant where she had 
worked, and who by her conduct had lost caste in the settlement, 
thus opened her heart to a pedestrian who helped her wheel her 
baby across the viaduct, one violently windy Sunday: “I’m 
going up to the county jail to see my husband. He sent word for 
me to bring the baby up for him to see. It’s now over a year old 
and he has never seen it, for he left me four months before it 
was born. I know what he really wants me for, though. He 
wants me to get him out of jail but I’m not going to. He has left 
75 A correspondent in the Dakota Freie Presse, September 10, 1912, 
writes that one of his townsmen has married a Russian lady who taught 
in the Zemstvo school in their village and that the marriage ceremony was 
performed by the Russian priest in Saratow: “Sie ist die erste Russin, 
welche hier in Kukkus Einzug gehalten hat. Die alten Deutschen schuet- 
telten zwar die Koepfe, aber. . . .” 
208 
