From Italy there have come to America well over three million immigrants. For two decades before 1870 they filtered in at the average rate of about one thousand a year; then the current increased to several thousand a year; and after 1880 it rose to a flood.[42] Over two-thirds of these Italians live in the larger cities; one-fourth of them are crowded into New York tenements.[43] Following in order, Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, New Orleans, Cleveland, St. Louis, Baltimore, Detroit, Portland, and Omaha have their Italian quarters, all characterized by overcrowded boarding houses and tenements, vast hordes of children, here and there an Italian bakery and grocery, on every corner a saloon, and usually a private bank with a steamship agency and the office of the local _padrone_. Scores of the lesser cities also have their Italian contingent, usually in the poorest and most neglected part of the town, where gaudily painted door jambs and window frames and wonderfully prosperous gardens proclaim the immigrant from sunny Italy. Not infrequently an old warehouse, store, or church is transformed into an ungainly and evil-odored barracks, housing scores of men who do their own washing and cooking. Those who do not dwell in the cities are at work in construction camps--for the Italian has succeeded the Irishman as the knight of the pick and shovel. The great bulk of these swarthy, singing, hopeful young fellows are peasants, unskilled of hand but willing of heart. Nearly every other one is unable to read or write. They have not come for political or religious reasons but purely as seekers for wages, driven from the peasant villages by overpopulation and the hazards of a precarious agriculture.