Inasmuch also as this inference coincided with the general public impression and prejudice to precisely the same effect, it occurred to nobody to dispute or seriously to question its validity. Anybody could tell you offhand that the Englishman, Frenchman, German or Swede was more available for citizenship and more easily assimilated than the Syrian, Croatian or Sicilian. It was a matter of common knowledge! And the Immigration Commission gave you the statistics--as if you needed any! For example, here is a table that shows the per cents naturalized for the “old” and “new” races who had been in the United States ten years or more. As is to be expected the “old” races show the highest per cents on both counts. The Commission recognized a general “tendency on the part of wage-earners of foreign birth to acquire citizenship,” and that this tendency “increased according to length of residence in this country.” But it construed its statistics as showing that while “more than three-fourths of the Bohemians and Moravians, Danish, German, Irish, Norwegian, Scotch, Swedish, and Welsh races who had been in the United States ten years or longer had been fully naturalized,” there was a “lack of political or civic interest” (only 37.7 per cent) “on the part of the southern and eastern European wage-earners” with a similar residence of ten years or longer, and proceeded to assert that these did not possess that “tendency to acquire citizenship which increases according to length of residence in this country.” This assertion was supposed to be supported by the facts given in the above table regarding the races from southern and eastern Europe showing low percentages of individuals who had come to this country when twenty-one years of age or older, who had lived here ten years or over, and were naturalized. The Commission regarded the table from which these facts were derived as highly significant in its implied indication of the “civic interest” exhibited and capable of being exhibited by the various racial groups. DISPARITY IN NUMBERS AMONG RACIAL GROUPS It should be remarked at once that inferences from these figures and others presented by the Immigration Commission require considerable discount and discrimination by reason of the fact--to which Miss Grace Abbott already has called attention[101]--that ... the numbers in the different races from whom information was secured by the Commission varied so greatly as to make it impossible to accept these conclusions as indicating the assimilability of the various national groups. For example, according to the percentages the Armenians appear to be more eager to become citizens than the North Italians or the Poles; but the comparison was made on the basis of information from 171 Armenians, 4,069 North Italians, and 10,923 Poles. TABLE VIII