of Cairo and Constantinople, where you are privileged
to haggle over every purchase in true oriental style. Even the
peddlers of lace and drawn-work find it hard to accustom themselves to
the occidental idea of a market price. With all their cunning as
traders, they respect learning, prize manual skill, possess a fine
artistic sense, and are law-abiding. The Armenians especially are
eager to become American citizens. Since the settlement of the
Northwestern lands, many thousands of Scandinavians and Finns have
flocked to the cities, where they are usually employed as skilled
craftsmen.[44]

Thus the United States, in a quarter of a century, has assumed a
cosmopolitanism in which the early German and Irish immigrants appear
as veteran Americans. This is not a stationary cosmopolitanism, like
that of Constantinople, the only great city in Europe that compares
with New York, Chicago, or Boston in ethnic complexity. It is a
shifting mass. No two generations occupy the same quarters. Even the
old rich move "up town" leaving their fine houses, derelicts of a
former splendor, to be divided into tenements where six or eight
Italian or Polish families find ample room for themselves and a crowd
of boarders.

Thousands of these migratory beings throng the steerage of
transatlantic ships every winter to return to their European homes.
The steamship companies, whose enterprise is largely responsible for
this flow of populations, reap their harvest; and many a decaying
village buried in the southern hills of Europe, or swept by the winds
of the great Slav plains, owes its regeneration ultimately to American
dollars.

They pay the price of their success, these flitting beings, links
between distant lands and our own. The great maw of mine and factory
devours thousands. Their lyric tribal songs are soon drowned by the
raucous voices of the city; their ancient folk-dances, meant for a
village green, not for a reeking dance-hall, lose here their native
grace; and the quaint and picturesque costumes of the European
peasant give place to American store clothes, the ugly badge of
equality.

The outward bound throng holds its head high, talks back at the
steward, and swaggers. It has become "American." The restless fever of
the great democracy is in its veins. Most of those who return home
will find their way back with others of their kind to the teeming
hives and the coveted fleshpots they are leaving. And again they will
tax the in