iftless, and
unintelligent races succeed best when employed in gangs on large
estates. The cotton and sugar fields of the South with their negro
workers have their counterpart in the plantations of Hawaii with their
Chinese and Japanese, and in the newly developed sugar-beet fields of
Nebraska, Colorado, and California, with their Russians, Bohemians,
Japanese, and Mexicans. In the domestic or small form of agriculture the
bulk of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe are not greatly
desired as wage-earners, and they do not succeed as proprietors and
tenants because they lack oversight and business ability. Where they are
located in colonies under favorable auspices the Italians have achieved
notable success, and in the course of Americanization they will
doubtless rival older nationalities. But in the immigrant stage they are
helpless, and it is the immigrants from Northwestern Europe, the Germans
and Scandinavians, whose thrift, self-reliance, and intensive
agriculture have made them from the start the model farmers of America.

The Jewish immigrant, particularly, is unfitted for the life of a
pioneer. Remarkably individualistic in character, his field of
enterprise is society, and not the land. Of the thirty thousand families
sent out from New York by industrial and agricultural removal societies,
nine-tenths are located in industry and trade, and the bulk of the
remainder, who are placed on farms, succeed by keeping summer boarders.
Depending on boarders, they neglect agriculture and buy their
food-stuff. Their largest colony of hoped-for agriculturists, Woodbine,
New Jersey, has become a clothing factory.[78] Yet the factory system,
with its discipline and regular hours, is distasteful to the Jew's
individualism. He prefers the sweat-shop, with its going and coming. If
possible, he rises through peddling and merchandising.

These are a few of the many illustrative facts which might be set forth
to show that the changing character of immigration is made possible by
the changing character of industry; and that races wholly incompetent
as pioneers and independent proprietors are able to find a place when
once manufactures, mines, and railroads have sprung into being, with
their captains of industry to guide and supervise their semi-intelligent
work.

CHAPTER VI

LABOR

We have seen that the character of the immigrants for whom a place can
be found depends upon the character of the industry. It also