in a fairly normal condition of health, and they will, of themselves, go far towards working out the rest of their salvation. And this can undoubtedly be done by intelligent municipal regulation, especially of housing conditions. The history of tenement house reform shows that the tenement house in itself has been responsible for much of the physical and moral degradation seen in our large cities. It is, indeed, impossible to calculate how great has been the social loss and waste, how heavy the additional burden of pauperism, due to the policy of allowing landlords to hive as many human beings as possible upon a given space of land, without regard to health or decency. In country districts, also, housing conditions are of the utmost importance, although this has largely been overlooked in the great interest aroused in city conditions. In the anthracite region, for instance, a high disease rate and infant death rate among the Slavs, as well as some of the social and moral evils there prevalent, are certainly due in large part to the wretched general sanitation of the towns, to the relegation of the Slavs, as far as possible, to undesirable quarters in the towns, and to the "company houses"-the poorer ones at least-in which about sixteen per cent. of the miners are obliged to live. Improvement in housing conditions has this special advantage as a means of social betterment, that its effects are relatively permanent. General sanitary laws as to cleanliness, disposal of refuse, etc., may be obeyed to-day and disregarded to-morrow; but if houses are once put up with adequate light and ventilation, if windows are once cut, court space provided for, sufficient distance from adjoining buildings secured, the height restricted, and proper plumbing installed-all this cannot be done away with in a day; and in fact, there is no great inducement to do away with it when the house owner has once made the investment. There is, in short, no surer and more comprehensive means of raising the standard of life among the poor than by compulsory improvement of their dwellings. If rents in the crowded sections of cities are raised in the process, it is one inducement the more to the spread of population into more open, and cheaper, districts, thus relieving congestion in the older quarters. Finally, there is a more or less remote danger of the emergence of pauperism in the second generation of our newer immigrants, due to physical and moral deterioration from causes already mentioned. It is impossible to tell, at the present time, how near, and how serious, this danger will prove to be. On the one hand, we see influences at work to reduce the physical health of children, to relax family discipline, and to disincline them for entering into any but a small range of pursuits. It cannot be said that the effects of our public school training on the children of immigrants is altogether fortunate. The ideals held up by the public schools to-day are too exclusively academic. The practical result of their teaching seems to be to turn the desires of children as far as possible from manual labor, and inspire them all with the ambition to be teachers, clerks, stenographers, attendants in stores, or at least factory workers. The young Italian boy will rather loaf on a street corner than go into unskilled manual work; and where opportunities are as crowded as they are in the lines he wants to follow, the chances are that he, and many like him, will loaf a long time, and learn many vices that are likely to lead to pauperism. Much the same may be said of the Slavic child. The only set of immigrants for whom our public schools appear to be comparatively well adapted are the Hebrews, who seem to be able by their means not only to strive for but to find places in commercial or professional pursuits. There are indications, however, that the schools are now beginning to recognize this lack, and, by provision for manual training, and training in the domestic and useful arts, are making a beginning toward raising hand work to the level of esteem accorded to other matters learned in school. It is certainly a serious defect in a system of popular education that it can reach persons in one great sphere of economic life only by taking them. out of it. On the whole there seems no reason why the second generation of Italian, Slavic and Hebrew immigrants, as a body, should furnish more paupers than did the Irish, Germans and English. The original stock of the newer immigration has been shown to be rather less, than more, inclined to pauperism than the older; the same influences now at work on the second generation of the newer immigrants were equally at work to drag down the children of older immigrants. While, however, the class of dependents of native birth and foreign parentage of the older immigration is in some respects more hopeless, and more troublesome to deal with than those of the first generation, the mass of it is small-so small that it has slight importance in statistics of pauperism. Foreign pauperism, as a rule, ends with the first generation, and there is no reason to think that the newer immigrants will prove an exception. |