Vol. XXXV, No. 5 



WASHINGTON 



May, 1919 



COPYRIGHT. 191 



.'ATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC SOi-IFTY. WASHINGTON. D. C. 



THE INDUSTRIAL TITAN OF AMERICA" 



Pennsylvania, Once the Keystone of the ■ Original Thir- 

 teen, Now the Keystone of Forty-eight 

 Sovereign States 



By John Oliver La Gorce 



Author of "The Warfare on Our Eastern Coast," "Roumania and Its Rubicon," etc. 



TO ATTEMPT a survey of the 

 Commonwealth of Pennsylvania 

 in a magazine article is akin to 

 describing an empire on a sheet of note 

 paper; for more than a dozen of the sov- 

 ereign nations of the earth as they were 

 in the years before the Prussian ran 

 amuck were smaller in area, and more 

 than half of the rulers of the world gov- 

 erned fewer people than live within the 

 confines of that State. 



With vast natural resources, immense 

 industries, plus the unconquerable spirit 

 of progress that tends to create local 

 happiness and national well-being, the 

 Keystone State, as it is proudly called, 

 challenges admiration and stirs the im- 

 agination. 



Measured in terms of our own coun- 

 try, Pennsylvania has many surprises for 

 the investigator of its position in the 

 Union. One might add the populations 

 of four far-western States to that of all 

 New England and still have fewer peo- 

 ple than" dwell in the land of William 

 Penn. Draw a line from the Canadian 

 border to the Rio Grande on the merid- 

 ian that separates the Dakotas and Ne- 

 braska from Montana and Wyoming, 

 and all of the people who live between 



*This is the first of a series of articles on 

 Our States. 



that line and the shores of the Pacific 

 would barely suffice to equal Penn-land's 

 population. 



Traveling through the State, one 

 quickly gathers the impression that it is 

 peopled with foreign-born. Its vast in- 

 dustries have laid heavy drafts upon the 

 labor markets of the world in times gone 

 by, and for years not a ship that carried 

 an immigrant to America came without 

 a quota bound for the iron, steel, and 

 coal centers of the Commonwealth. 



MANY NATIONS HAVE CONTRIBUTED TO 

 THE STATE'S ARMY OF LABOR 



An analysis proves, however, that even 

 with the influx of alien labor, Pennsyl- 

 vania outranks every other State in the 

 Union in the number of sons and daugh- 

 ters of native parentage. Even New 

 York has a million fewer people whose 

 parents were born under the aegis of the 

 American flag. 



Still, the State is distinguished for its 

 great number of foreigners. No other 

 State has so many Welsh, Austrians, or 

 Hungarians. It has more Welsh than 

 County Radnorshire, more Austrians 

 than the Province of Salzburg, more 

 Hungarians than any two cities in Hun- 

 gary, Budapest excepted. It has as many 

 English as the counties of Cambridge 



