be willing to devote their undoubted mental capacities to other than
revolutionary vagaries or to gainful pursuits, for they have a
tendency to commercialize everything they touch. They have shown no
reluctance to enter politics; they learn English with amazing
rapidity, throng the public schools and colleges, and push with
characteristic zeal and persistence into every open door of this
liberal land.

From Italy there have come to America well over three million
immigrants. For two decades before 1870 they filtered in at the
average rate of about one thousand a year; then the current increased
to several thousand a year; and after 1880 it rose to a flood.[42]
Over two-thirds of these Italians live in the larger cities;
one-fourth of them are crowded into New York tenements.[43] Following
in order, Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, New Orleans, Cleveland, St.
Louis, Baltimore, Detroit, Portland, and Omaha have their Italian
quarters, all characterized by overcrowded boarding houses and
tenements, vast hordes of children, here and there an Italian bakery
and grocery, on every corner a saloon, and usually a private bank with
a steamship agency and the office of the local _padrone_. Scores of
the lesser cities also have their Italian contingent, usually in the
poorest and most neglected part of the town, where gaudily painted
door jambs and window frames and wonderfully prosperous gardens
proclaim the immigrant from sunny Italy. Not infrequently an old
warehouse, store, or church is transformed into an ungainly and
evil-odored barracks, housing scores of men who do their own washing
and cooking. Those who do not dwell in the cities are at work in
construction camps--for the Italian has succeeded the Irishman as the
knight of the pick and shovel. The great bulk of these swarthy,
singing, hopeful young fellows are peasants, unskilled of hand but