Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/597

Rh Greek colonists came to establish their cities among the native Siculi. Later the Carthaginians and after them the Romans brought great numbers of slaves to the island. Goth and Vandal came and disappeared. The Saracens, themselves mixed with black blood, held the island nearly two hundred years, until the island was conquered by the Normans. All these races left their traces in the modern population of Sicily. But where once the great cities of Syracuse, Agrigentum, Segesta, flourished we find to-day ignorance, poverty, crime; here is the home of the Black Hand and the Mafia. The southern part of the Italian boot, the old kingdom of Naples, has almost the same history as Sicily, and the modern conditions there are not much different. The best portion of the Italian people are the brachycephalic North-Italians. It is these sturdy and energetic people who have brought about Italian unity. By their thriftiness, intelligence and love of law and justice they form the backbone of the Italian monarchy. If we cross the Adriatic we find on the Balkan peninsula a mixture of peoples, a Völkergemisch, made up of hardly less numerous elements than the population of Italy. The Slavic race forms here a predominating element among a population greatly mixed in other ways. The modern Greeks are largely of Slavic origin. They are not the descendants of the ancient Greeks. That noble race, greatly mixed with barbarian blood during the middle ages, was almost completely destroyed in the course of the frequent uprisings against Turkish rule. Slavic immigrants gradually repeopled the country. The same intense mixture of different races we find in Asia Minor and Syria, countries which send considerable numbers of immigrants to our shores. The least mixed of all these races are the Slavs of Russia. Yet this people has little in common with the race that settled America. The Russians are behind all other nations of Europe in social and political development. The mass of the people is ignorant, servile, superstitious, and, according to the opinion of a close observer, unfit for self-government.

The broad-headed Jews are not as pure a race as has commonly been supposed. They have been greatly mixed with the peoples among whom they lived. Especially is this true of the Russian and Polish Jews, who form such a large portion of the American immigrants. The best type of all these various peoples are probably the brachycephalic Hungarians. Though dissimilar from the other races of Europe, they possess valuable qualities; they ate preeminently an intellectual people and well fitted for self-government.

These are the peoples from whom the later immigration to the United States is recruiting itself. All differ among themselves as much as they