Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 49.djvu/648

626 The Massachusetts census of 1885, which was taken with great care and completeness, shows the same condition of affairs. The foreign born of that State were 27·1 per cent of the whole population, and yet they furnished 44·03 per cent of the paupers, 40·60 of the prisoners, and 36·87 per cent of the convicts.

If we take the statistics of the children of foreigners the result is almost the same. The people of foreign parentage in Massachusetts are 47·36 per cent of the whole, yet the number of prisoners with both parents foreign born was 60·30 per cent, and the number of convicts with both parents foreign born was 51·14 per cent.

The statistics of the national census of 1890 reveal the same condition. The native white element of the population is 54·87 per cent, but it produces only 43·19 per cent of the white prisoners. The foreign white element, counting foreign born and the children of foreign born, is only 32·93 per cent of the population, and yet it produces 56·81 per cent of the white prisoners.

The statistics may also be stated by ratios per million in each class so as to include the negroes, which gives a still more striking result:

The negro, though born on the soil, is in every sense an alien, and if we wish to see how much crime is due to our various experiments in importing foreign populations we have only to connect the negro ratio of crime with the foreign white ratio and compare them with the native ratio. The result can be seen by a glance at the above table and is rather startling.

We hear a great deal about the crime of murder in the United States and its great increase, and it may be interesting to know the source of a large portion of it. Our population is now divided into native white, foreign white, negro, Chinese, Japanese, and civilized Indians; and the census of 1890 shows the percentage of homicide to be assigned to each in proportion to percentage of population: