The evil to
be removed is one that is steadily and rapidly on the increase, and its
removal will strike at the root of fraudulent elections, poverty,
disease, and crime in our large cities, and on the other hand largely
supply that increasing demand for labor to develop the natural resources
of our country."[71]
[Sidenote: Little Italy]
Not to draw the picture all in the darker shades, let us look at the
best type of Italian tenement life. We are not left to guesswork in the
matter. Settlement workers and students of social questions are actually
living in the tenement and slum sections, so as to know by experience
and not hearsay. One of these investigators, Mrs. Lillian W. Betts,
author of two enlightening books,[72] has lived for a year in one of the
most crowded tenements in one of the most densely populated sections of
the Italian quarter. We condense some of her statements, which reveal
the foreign life of to-day in New York's Little Italy, with its 400,000
souls.
[Sidenote: Immigrant Isolation]
"A year's residence in an Italian tenement taught me first of all the
isolation of a foreign quarter; how completely cut off one may be from
everything that makes New York New York.
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