Most of these are not only outmatched in every battle of life in the fastest and biggest city in the world, but they were far behind in their own unhappy land before they left, and that was why they left. The callous exploitation of these weaklings is one of the dirtiest crimes in the long and shameful record of practical American politics. None knows better than those who have primed and prompted and financed the exodus, what they are doing to these victims and what they are doing to the city where they bring them in gutted one-motor planes, sitting on bucket seats, sometimes so crowded that many stand all the way, air-sick and already homesick. The sight of one of these outmoded flying cattle boats, long since discarded by the government services and regular transport lines, is horrifying and nauseating. The pilgrims are dropped off at Newark or small private landing places, carrying bundles and babies and the weight of fear and sorrow, through which the gleam of new hope cannot penetrate. They are marched in and carried in dilapidated buses directly to the filthy, shrieking, miserable rookeries where housing has long been exhausted. This means that each new arrival will be shoe-horned into already jammed, unsanitary, indecent lodgings, to sleep on the floor or even in a hallway. The relief figures look good and they should, because they are designedly excessive. But prices are high and before these strangers arrive the sharks are waiting and smacking their lips. And so they constitute not only a horde unfitted for the new habitat, but they quickly become resentful under the hostile conditions, so different from the utopia which smooth-tongued agents painted to people who had never been off the island on which they were born. Not only that frame of mind, but public support, with a tremendous factor of idleness, proximity to the regions of lowest vice and highest crime, easy opportunity to mingle in the swirl of the unwashed underworld, rapidly perverts them. They pick up the bad habits of those with whom they are forced to associate, and these they amplify with the enthusiasm of untutored islanders for illegitimate revelry and dissipation. Merchants of every form of dope, vice and alcohol await them eagerly with merchandise within their means. Finding themselves unable physically, mentally or financially to compete, they turn to guile and wile and the steel blade, the traditional weapon of the sugar-cane cutter, mark of their blood and heritage. New York, of course, is not easily pushed around and turns on them, which makes them more bitter and more belligerent, which brings upon them heavier punishment, which makes them uglier, and thus a constant and increasing spiral of hatred spins around these hundreds of thousands. Some manage to straggle back. But it is an established fact that the city holds and fascinates and imprisons those who have once felt the magic of its embrace.