immigrants, too, are of a new type. When Henry James revisited Boston
after a long absence, he was shocked at the "gross little foreigners"
who infested its streets, and he said it seemed as if the fine old
city had been wiped with "a sponge saturated with the foreign mixture
and passed over almost everything I remembered and might have still
recovered."[34]

Until 1882 the bulk of immigration, as we have seen, came from the
north of Europe, and these immigrants were kinsmen to the American and
for the most part sought the country. The new immigration, however,
which chiefly sought the cities, hailed from southern and eastern
Europe. It has shown itself alien in language, custom, in ethnic
affinities and political concepts, in personal standards and
assimilative ambitions. These immigrants arrived usually in masculine
hordes, leaving women and children behind, clinging to their own kind
with an apprehensive mistrust of all things American, and filled with
the desire to extract from this fabulous mine as much gold as possible
and then to return to their native villages. Yet a very large number
of those who have gone home to Europe have returned to America with
bride or family. As a result the larger cities of the United States
are congeries of foreign quarters, whose alarming fecundity fills the
streets with progeny and whose polyglot chatter on pay night turns
even many a demure New England town into a veritable babel.

There are in the United States today roughly eight or ten millions of
these new immigrants. A line drawn southward from Minneapolis to St.
Louis and thence eastward to Washington would embrace over four-fifths
of them, for most of the great American cities lie in this
northeastern corner of the land. Whence come these millions? From the
vast and mysterious lands of the Slavs, from Italy, from Greece, and