Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 62.djvu/348

342 indulgence in the most degraded and perverted appetites are growing daily more pronounced and more offensive.'

There would seem to be a disposition to regard such moral deterioration as the result of the prevalent squalor and overcrowding, but it is to be noted that the conditions in which these people live in New York at the present day are superior to those to which most of the immigrants were accustomed before they came, and are much better than those which they find in our other large cities or in London. The squalor and overcrowding, though conspicuous because of the extent of the 'Ghetto,' is much less pronounced than in the Italian, Syrian or Greek quarters, and the household régime of the poorest Jews gains by comparison with the family life of other foreigners in the tenement districts.

Moral deterioration may be pointed out in the case of every foreign element that has come to this country, just as it may be among the country-bred youth of our own population who feel in new abodes loss of personal identity and exemption from former moral restraints. In the case of foreigners there is added also a loss of parental control through the greater facility with which children identify themselves with the language and customs of the new environment and by what passes for the process of 'becoming Americanized,' the younger Jews come to look with indifference and even contempt upon the precepts which have safeguarded their race through a troublous past.

After all, when it is considered that the Jews have been estimated as constituting one fourth of the population of Manhattan, it may be questioned whether evidence of moral degradation may not have attracted attention because it was unexpected rather than because it is unproportionally prevalent.

In a great measure the poverty to be found in the 'Ghetto' is due to disease or lack of physical strength. Jewish immigrants of a military age who could pass our army requirements for recruits are comparatively rare, while few of their fellow immigrants, the Poles, would fail to pass such a test. Among the Jews also, senile decay is pronounced at an age when the German, Englishman or Scandinavian is still in his physical and mental prime. Chronic disease is much more prevalent among the Hebrew than among the Slavic immigrants, and common among the former are diseases rarely if ever seen in the case of the latter. The mental standard of the Jewish immigration fails to offset its physical inferiority when brought into active competition with other elements of our cosmopolitan population. Physical breakdown comes sooner or later and the ravages of tuberculosis are in evidence to an extent that is quite at variance with old notions of racial insusceptibility to this disease. This state of