nce which is so necessary to the indigent laborer looking for
work. Thus it is that those races of immigrants the least self-reliant
or forehanded, like the Irish and the Italians, seek the cities in
greater proportions than those sturdy races like the Scandinavians,
English, Scotch, and Germans. The Jew, also, coming from the cities of
Europe, seeks American cities by the very reason of his racial distaste
for agriculture, and he finds there in his coreligionists the necessary
assistance for a beginning in American livelihood.

At this point we gradually pass over from the industrial motives of city
influx to the parasitic motives. The United Hebrew Charities of New York
have asserted that one-fourth of the Jews of that city are applicants
for charity, and the other charitable societies make similar estimates
for the population at large. These estimates must certainly be
exaggerated, and a careful analysis of their methods of keeping
statistics will surely moderate such startling statements, but we must
accept them as the judgment of those who have the best means of knowing
the conditions of poverty and pauperism in the metropolis. However
exaggerated, they indicate an alarming extent of abject penury brought
on by immigration, for it is mainly the immigrant and the children of
the immigrant who swell the ranks of this indigent element in our great
cities.

Those who are poverty-stricken are not necessarily parasitic, but they
occupy that intermediate stage between the industrial and the parasitic
classes from which either of these classes may be recruited. If through
continued poverty they become truly parasitic, then they pass over to
the ranks of the criminal, the pauper, the vicious, the indolent, and
the vagrant, who, like the industrial class, seek the cities.

The dangerous effects of city life on immigrants and the children of
immigrants cannot be too strongly emphasized. This country can absorb
millions of all races from Europe and can raise them and their
descendants to relatively high standards of American citizenship in so
far as it can find places for them on the farms. "The land has been our
great solvent."[95] But the cities of this country not only do not raise
the immigrants to the same degree of independence, but are themselves
dragged down by the parasitic and dependent conditions which they foster
among the immigrant element.

[Illustration: DR. ORONHYATEKHA MOHAWK INDIAN, LATE CHIEF OF ORDER O