Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/398

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THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

and customs. The young men and boys have been coming in large numbers during the past eight years and the women are following as the men graduate from work on the railroads to the proprietorship of a fruit-stand or restaurant. Still as the fol- lowing table shows, a very large proportion of the Greeks are men between the ages of twenty and thirty — the sex and age of greatest criminality in all nationalities.

TABLE SHOWING AGE AND SEX OF GREEKS VISITED IN CHICAGO

Number of Greeks Visited

Male

Female

Total

Under 15 years of age

From 15 to 20 years of age

From 20 to 30 years of age

From 30 to 40 years of age

Over 40 years of age

'48

608

214

86

31 128

63 24

265

79 736 277 no

Total

956

246

1,467

This very large proportion of men makes the life of the Greek colony entirely different from that of a people who have been coming for the last thirty or forty years. The men who are here alone must live together in large groups without the re- straining influences which come with normal family relation- ships. Certainly this would account for much of the immorality with which Greek men have been charged. There is little doubt that in this respect they are worse than at home, due probably to the demoralizing effect which living in a city's congested dis- trict, where invitations to vice are on every side and where there is no counter-claim or attraction of a home, always has on men or women."^

The most hopeful sign is that the Greeks who have been in the country for some time are coming to appreciate this and are trying to make their fellow-countrymen realize the danger which the situation presents.

' Charles K. Tuckerman, at one time United States minister to Greece, said of them in his book The Greeks of Today (N. Y., 1872) that family ties are very strong and as a consequence the people chaste, and added, p. 349, "I am persuaded that no city in the world of forty or fifty thousand inhabitants can boast fewer invitations to sensual vice than does Athens."