t
is in the cities, but any one who has seen it under both conditions
cannot doubt that if it is slower it is more real. In the cities the
children are more regularly brought under the influence of the public
schools, but more profound and lasting than the education of the schools
is the education of the street and the community. The work of the
schools in a great city like New York cannot be too highly praised, and
without such work the future of the immigrant's child would be dark. In
fact the children of the immigrant are better provided with school
facilities than the children of the Americans. Less than 1 per cent of
their children 10 to 14 years of age are illiterate, but the proportion
of illiterates among children of native parents is over 4 per cent. This
is not because the foreigner is more eager to educate his child than is
the native, but because nearly three-fourths of the foreigners' children
and only one-sixth of the natives' children live in the larger cities,
where schools and compulsory attendance prevail. Were it not for
compulsory education, the child of the peasant immigrant would be, like
the child of the Slav in the anthracite coal fields, "the helpless
victim of the ignorance, frugality, and industrial instincts of his
parents."[137] As it is, they drop out of the schools at the earliest
age allowed by law, and the hostility of foreigners to factory
legislation and its corollary compulsory school legislation is more
difficult to overcome than the hostility of American employers, both of
whom might profit by the work of their children. The thoroughness with
which the great cities of the North enforce the requirements of primary
education leaves but little distinction between the children of natives
and the children of foreigners, but what difference remains is to the
advantage of the natives. In Boston in 1900 only 5 children of native
parents were illiterate, and 22 native children of foreign parents, a
ratio of one-twentieth of 1 per cent for the natives and one-tenth of 1
per cent for the foreigners. In New York 68 of the 83,000 children of
native parents were illiterate, and 311 of the 166,000 native children
of foreign parents, a ratio insignificant in both cases, but more than
twice as great for the foreigners as for the natives.[138] Taking all of
the cities of at least 50,000 population, more than one-fourth of the
foreign-born children 10 to 15 years of age are bread-winners, and only
one-