The Immigrant Invasion (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE INVASION OF SLAVS AND ITALIANS If we had taken a place by the side of " The Man at the Gate " in the port of New York early in the decade between 1880 and 1890 we would have witnessed the beginning of a change in the racial composition of our immigration that to-day has become of far-reaching significance. We would have seen it transforming from northwestern European nationalities of Teutonic and Celtic stock to those from eastern and southern Europe of Slavonic, Lettic, Italic, Finnic, and Chaldean descent?from the peoples of Germany, Ireland, England, Scotland, Wales, and the Scandinavian countries to those from Russia, Austria, Hungary, and Italy. While as observers we would likely have recognised the change because of the widely varying racial characteristics of the two distinct groups, we could not have even conjectured its growth to its huge volume of to-day or foretold its present significance. If we could combine the imaginative faculty and descriptive ability of Conan Doyle with the clarifying perception of H. G. Wells, we might be able to word-picture its characteristics and graphically to outline the full meaning of it all. Lacking these, we canbut record and comment upon the facts. This we are able to do by means of the census statistics of our foreign-born population. Take a sheet of blank paper the size of this printed page and draw upon it in ink seven perpendicular lines half an inch apart. Assume each line to represent a decade from 1850 to 1910, both inclusive. Begin with 1850 because that is the first year for which there is a census enumeration of our foreign-born population. In the column to the left of the first line write in ink the names of the more important countries or groups of countries t that through immigration contribute...