n commercial life they are
traders, pawnbrokers, and peddlers, and control the artificial-flower
and passementerie trade.

By far the largest group are the latest comers, the Russian Jews.
"Ultra orthodox," says Edward A. Steiner, "yet ultra radical; chained
to the past, and yet utterly severed from it; with religion permeating
every act of life, or going to the other extreme and having 'none of
it'; traders by instinct, and yet among the hardest manual laborers
of our great cities. A complex mass in which great things are yearning
to express themselves, a brooding mass which does not know itself and
does not lightly disclose itself to the outside."[41] Nearly a million
of these people are crowded into the New York ghettos. Large numbers
of them engage in the garment industries and the manufacture of
tobacco. They graduate also into junk-dealers, pawnbrokers, and
peddlers, and are soon on their way "up town." Among them socialism
thrives, and the second generation displays an unseemly haste to break
with the faith of its fathers.

The Jews are the intellectuals of the new immigration. They invest
their political ideas with vague generalizations of human
amelioration. They cannot forget that Karl Marx was a Jew: and one
wonders how many Trotzkys and Lenines are being bred in the stagnant
air of their reeking ghettos. It remains to be seen whether they will
be willing to devote their undoubted mental capacities to other than
revolutionary vagaries or to gainful pursuits, for they have a
tendency to commercialize everything they touch. They have shown no
reluctance to enter politics; they learn English with amazing
rapidity, throng the public schools and colleges, and push with
characteristic zeal and persistence into every open door of this
liberal land.

From Italy there have come to America well over three million
immigrants. For two decades before 1870 they filtered in at the
average rate of about one thousand a year; then the current increased
to several thousand a year; and after 1880 it rose to a flood.[42]
Over two-thirds of these Italians live in the larger cities;
one-fourth of them are crowded into New York tenements.[43] Following
in order, Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, New Orleans, Cleveland, St.
Louis, Baltimore, Detroit, Portland, and Omaha have their Italian
quarters, all characterized by overcrowded boarding houses and
tenements, vast hordes of children, here and there an Italian bakery
and grocery,