But for the bulk of the ordinary immigrants the economic and other advantages are offset by terrible hardships and losses. As one thinks of the broken and separated families, often never reunited; of the depressing, and degrading group life of men in this country; of religious ideals shattered and new vices acquired in the unwonted and untempered atmosphere of American liberty; of the frequent industrial accidents and unceasing overstrain of the Slavs in mine and factory, upon which they reckon as one of the concomitants of life in America, and which sends them back to Europe in a few years, broken and prematurely aged, but with an accumulation of dollars;[389] of the tuberculosis contracted by Italians in the confined life to which they are unaccustomed, and by Greek boot-blacks in their squalid quarters and their long day’s labors;[390] of the sad conditions of labor in the sweatshops and tenement workrooms;[391] of the child labor in the cranberry bogs of Massachusetts and New Jersey;[392] of the destruction of family life by the taking of boarders, and the heart-breaking toil of the boarding-boss’s wife;[393] of the unremitting toil and scant recreation, of the low wages and insufficient standard of living, of the unsparing and niggardly thrift by which the savings are made possible—as one thinks of these things, which are all too common to be considered exceptional, and compares them with the conditions which characterize peasant life in Europe, where many æsthetic and neighborly circumstances tend to offset the poverty, one cannot help wondering how large a proportion of our immigrants finally reap a net gain in the things that are really worth while. It is useless for any individual to undertake to answer this question categorically for immigrants in general. The answer rests too much upon personal opinion and estimation of relative values. The point that needs to be emphasized in this connection is that against the evident and unquestioned economic gain of most, and the general social and intellectual gain of many, there must be set off a long list of serious, though not always obvious, evils which result for a large proportion of the immigrants under present conditions.