# The Old World in the New/Chapter 5

Distribution of Italians and natives of Italian Parentage—1910
CHAPTER V
the italians
THE immigration from Italy has shot up like Jonah's gourd. During the last decade a fourth of our immigrants have been Italians, and from being a twentieth part of our foreign-born, they have risen to be a tenth. This freshet is not born of religious or political oppression, for Italy enjoys a government on modern lines, created by the efforts of patriots like Mazzini, Cavour, and Garibaldi. The impulse that every year prompts from a quarter to a half of a million Italians to wander oversea is purely economic. Ignorance and the subjection of women cause blind multiplication, with the result that the Italians are wresting their food from narrower plots than any other European people. A population approximating that of all our Atlantic States is trying to live from a space little greater than the combined areas of New York and Georgia. Although Argentina seconds the United States in absorbing the overflow, still, Italy's population continually swells, her birth-rate is not sinking so rapidly as her death-rate, and one sees no reason why the Italian dusk should not in time quench what of the Celto-Teutonic flush lingers in the cheek of the native American.
Italian Gypsy Mother and Child
Photograph by Hine
Italian Woman of Greek or Albanian Ancestry ​Page:The Old World in the New (1914).djvu/121 ​Page:The Old World in the New (1914).djvu/122 ​Page:The Old World in the New (1914).djvu/123 ​Page:The Old World in the New (1914).djvu/124 ​Page:The Old World in the New (1914).djvu/125 ​Page:The Old World in the New (1914).djvu/126 ​Page:The Old World in the New (1914).djvu/127 ​Page:The Old World in the New (1914).djvu/128 ​Page:The Old World in the New (1914).djvu/129 ​Page:The Old World in the New (1914).djvu/130 ​Page:The Old World in the New (1914).djvu/131 ​Page:The Old World in the New (1914).djvu/132 ​Page:The Old World in the New (1914).djvu/133 ​Page:The Old World in the New (1914).djvu/134 ​Page:The Old World in the New (1914).djvu/135 ​Page:The Old World in the New (1914).djvu/136 ​Page:The Old World in the New (1914).djvu/137 ​Page:The Old World in the New (1914).djvu/138 ​The principal of a school with four hundred Sicilian pupils observes that on the playground they are at once more passionate and more vindictive than other children. Elsewhere, once discipline has been established, “the school will run itself”; but in this school the teacher “has to sit on the lid all the time.” Their restlessness keeps the truant officer busy, and their darting, flickering attention denies them concentration and the steady, telling stroke. For all their apparent brightness, when at fourteen they quit school, they are rarely beyond the third or fourth grade.
As grinding rusty iron reveals the bright metal, so American competition brings to light the race stuff in poverty-crushed immigrants. But not all this stuff is of value in a democracy like ours. Only a people endowed with a steady attention, a slow-fuse temper, and a persistent will can organ- ize itself for success in the international rivalries to come. So far as the American people consents to incorporate with itself great numbers of waver- ing, excitable, impulsive persons who cannot or- ganize themselves, it must in the end resign itself to lower efficiency, to less democracy, or to both.
Immigration from Italy, 1866–1910