V
OUR ITALIAN NEIGHBOR

Numbers. Our immigrant neighbor that has attracted the most attention in the last decade has been the Italian. He has attracted this notice, first, because of his great numbers and, second, because of the inferior quality as compared with much previous immigration.

Over two millions have come from Italy in the past ten years, and the numbers show little prospect of diminishing. This stream that two decades ago was but a tiny rivulet is now a human Amazon. The Amazon of South America pours so vast a tide into the ocean that the sailor while far from sight of land may yet dip his bucket overboard and draw up fresh water. We may well inquire about these people who are flowing in so vast a flood into the sea of our American life.

In the year ending June 30, 1911, 213,360 Italian immigrants entered. In 1910, 233,453 were admitted. The largest number entering in any one year was in 1907, when 294,061 passed through the various entry ports.

When we are dealing in millions figures suggest little or nothing to us. Let us take another method to show the large numbers of this one nationality that are pouring in through all our gates.

Imagine the two millions of the last ten years drawn up in a single line, each holding the hand of the fellow countryman on his right and left. How far will this human chain extend?

Suppose we step aboard a train at New York. We pass along the Palisade-bordered Hudson, past Yonkers, West Point, Poughkeepsie, Hudson and Albany, one hundred and fifty miles. These black-eyed children of Italy line the track all the way. At Albany we turn west and go to Utica, Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo. We have come over four hundred miles and still the line is unbroken. Here the porter makes up our sleeping berth, and all through the night, past Detroit and into Chicago, the metropolis of the Middle West, along a thousand miles of railroad stretches our imaginary hand-clasped line. From Chicago we journey still further toward the sunset until we rumble across the Father of Waters and into the station at St. Louis. Surely these endless faces are no longer beside our train. But there they are; westward still extends our immigrant line. From St. Louis we travel right across the state of Missouri to Kansas City, almost three hundred miles. Our train moves so fast across the level country that the hand-clasped strangers seem like closely placed pickets in an endless fence, but still the line is there and we must travel one hundred miles across Kansas before the last of that endless chain waves us farewell. And all these have come in ten years.

The Italian Compared with Former Immigrants. The earliest immigration to America was not that of the peasant class. “It was the middle class tradesman and the stout, independent yeoman.” The immigration of a few years ago, as is well known, was from Northern Europe, bringing the German, the Scotch, the English, the Irish, the Welsh and the Scandinavian. These were races from the temperate zone who had gained culture and the virtues of a Christian civilization, largely Protestant, through long centuries of intelligent struggle. The Italian immigrant of today is from Southern Italy. The Northern Italian, more skilled and better educated, does not come to the United States in any large numbers; his goal is mainly Argentina and Brazil, in South America.

The Italians from Sicily have lacked educational advantages. If, when they land at the Battery from Ellis Island, you asked them to read the name of the street upon the lamp post, sixty out of every hundred would shake their heads. In the public schools the Italian is by no means so clever as some of the other immigrants, nor is he employing his leisure time in so wise a manner as is the Jew, for instance.

Thrift. The Italian is frugal and thrifty. Most of them seem to have money. A poor woman exclaimed at one of our free Saturday night concerts some time ago, “O Signore, some one has robbed me.” I looked at her and thought to myself, “She is so poorly dressed I do not believe she has lost much,” but I said, “Come and see me after the concert.” On talking with her I found that the thief had been better informed than I, for he had cut the skirt of her dress with a knife and had taken $80 which was in an inside pocket. It is no unusual sight for a laborer to draw from his wallet a roll of bills amounting to $50 or more to pay for a ten cent spelling book in our night school. The amount of real estate the Italians own in New York is very large; some years ago it was estimated at over sixty millions. It is probably more than double that today. Some of them own tenements and rent rooms that are slept in by day by one shift of men and at night by another.

One must be careful that he is not an innocent party to placing children in orphan asylums and other such homes to be educated at the public’s expense when the family is entirely able to support its own children. An Italian woman wished me to place her two boys in “college.” By “college” she meant an orphan asylum. When I investigated I found that she was married, had a husband who was in perfect health, and was herself worth between three and four thousand dollars. The church receives very little financial support from these people, although they are lavish enough when it comes to a big display at a wedding, a christening, or a funeral. The money paid for bands to walk before the hearse must amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars every year in the Italian colony of New York City.

How They Are Misused. There is no question but that the Italian earns the money that is paid him in America; no better laborers ever came to these shores, and the way they are sometimes misused is shameful. I saw once a pitiful exhibition of this. It was an August day, one of the most intensely hot I had ever experienced, and all the worse because it was in a long succession of stifling days and nights. Everywhere men were stopping their horses and cooling them off with the hose, or with pails of water and, despite it all, dead horses were lying in all the principal thoroughfares.

An Irish boss was foreman of a gang of Italians that was asphalting a city street. A line was drawn down the middle of the street and the force divided, each gang taking the part on either side of the line from the middle of the street to the curb. The gang that asphalted their half of the block first would receive as reward a keg of beer that stood perched, temptingly, on an elevated platform at the end of the street. I do not remember ever seeing elsewhere human beings driven at such inhuman speed; it was a cruel proof of what greed and a total disregard of the welfare of the poor immigrants could furnish.

A writer in “Everybody’s Magazine” saw the statement of the press agent of the Erie Railroad that no lives had been lost in cutting the great open air rock entrance of the Erie into Jersey City. He was interested enough to investigate it, and he learned of twenty-five who were killed and so many who were injured that a partial list filled four newspaper columns, a year before the work was completed. “Why,” he asked, “was it said that no lives were lost?” “Because,” was the reply, “the killed were only Wops (Huns) and Dagoes.”

Spiritually. The Italian is naturally religious, and when converted he becomes an earnest, intelligent follower of Christ. We must not fail to tell him the story of “Jesus and his love.”