illiterate. It is also necessary to discriminate between the man who is illiterate and the man who is uneducated. A man may be unable to read or write, and yet he may be able to mine coal, or set out grape cuttings, and trim and train the vines. This man is illiterate, but he can not be called uneducated. His illiteracy may be due to causes over which he had no control, as persecution of, or discrimination against, his race by the government under which he lived. The races which have suffered most show a high percentage of illiteracy—the Pole, the Lithuanian, and the Jew. Within seventy-five years of catholic emancipation in Ireland, and the revocation of the penal laws, illiteracy among Irish immigrants dropped from above 50 per cent, to 4 per cent. Other races have as great a hunger for education as these Irish, and meet their first opportunity for sending their children to school, after arriving in America.
Many an Irish immigrant of fifty years ago, who could neither read nor write, and who perhaps could only fix the date of his birth by its proximity to 'the night of the big wind,' became prosperous here, sent his children to school and lived long enough to see them occupy high places in the land of his adoption.
The Americanization of immigrants who do not speak English will take a longer time than was necessary for the Americanization of immigrants from Ireland, but time and American schools work wonders, and already the children of poor Russian Jews of the Ghetto can be pointed out as making their mark in the business or professional world.
The majority of the immigrants who are illiterate come here to supply the demand for unskilled labor, and the mere fact of being able to read or write in their own language would not aid them one iota in their work or make them one whit more desirable to their employers. There is often expressed a fear of the growing numbers of the illiterate laborers in this country, because of their tendency to socialism or anarchy. As a matter of fact the illiterate laborer is less dangerous from this cause than the discontented laborer of some education. The illiterate immigrant can only be reached from the public platform and the anarchistic exhorter can be easily suppressed or deported, but it is not so easy to prevent the dissemination of anarchistic pamphlets, which sow the seeds of discord and fan the flame of discontent in the heart of the laborer who can read.
Much has been written of the great proportion of criminals and paupers which is made up of aliens. In accepting statements of this character, it is well to take into consideration the fact that position in life has much to do with the tendency to commit crime, and that our immigrants necessarily begin life at the lowest rung of the ladder. Paupers and criminals will ever come in the greatest proportion from
