Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 66.djvu/250

246 the tenement dwellers of our crowded cities. The unfortunates, regardless of race, who are exposed to the hardships of the tenement and temptations of the slum, may be expected to furnish the largest proportion of inmates for our penal and charitable institutions. Statistics comparing the tendency to pauperism and criminality of the foreign born with that of natives, are apt to be misleading. These statistics almost invariably fail to take account of the predominating influence of sex and age upon crime. It can be demonstrated that the vast majority of criminals are of the male sex and between the ages of 20 and 45 years. The males exceed the females among immigrants in the proportion of 2.5 to 1, and about 75 per cent, are between the ages of 15 to 40. Persons less than 15 seldom are criminals and the immense number of natives below that age contribute few to the number of criminals, but help greatly to reduce the criminal average in the total native population. The great majority of immigrants, on the other hand, are of the sex and age which predispose to crime. It is also a fact that before our laws were made strict, and rigidly enforced, thousands of paupers, cripples and criminals were shipped here from Europe, and the effect of these upon our institutional statistics can be imagined, but should not be charged to the immigrant of to-day.

Even if the immigrant could be eliminated from our social problem, Utopia would not be with us. The lowly place now occupied by the foreign born, the lowest stratum of our social formation, would still exist, and would then be made up of urban degenerates or native failures from the rural districts. Idealists seem to think that the immigrant is wholly responsible for the slum with its crime and pauperism. The responsibility for the slum can be divided between money-grasping property owners and an indifferent puerile civic administration. The immigrant finds the tenements and the slums already established when he arrives and is the victim and not the cause of them.

The tendency of foreign-born towards cities, as places of permanent residence, is a well-known and widely discussed social problem. The real distribution of our immigrants is merely indicated by the destination given by newly-arrived aliens at Ellis Island, and the more accurate knowledge of their places of residence here is given by the United States census returns. Immigrants at Ellis Island may give New York as their destination, yet after a short time go to Wisconsin, Texas or Louisiana. Others destined for the far west may never proceed farther than the Atlantic seaboard, but the United States census finds them in their permanent homes, wherever they may be, from Maine to California, from Alaska to Florida. This tendency of the foreign born to crowd our large cities is not of recent development. It has been the case ever since our cities attained great size. The