Suppose we step aboard a train at New York. We pass along the Palisade-bordered Hudson, past Yonkers, West Point, Poughkeepsie, Hudson and Albany, one hundred and fifty miles. These black-eyed children of Italy line the track all the way. At Albany we turn west and go to Utica, Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo. We have come over four hundred miles and still the line is unbroken. Here the porter makes up our sleeping berth, and all through the night, past Detroit and into Chicago, the metropolis of the Middle West, along a thousand miles of railroad stretches our imaginary hand-clasped line. From Chicago we journey still further toward the sunset until we rumble across the Father of Waters and into the station at St. Louis. Surely these endless faces are no longer beside our train. But there they are; westward still extends our immigrant line. From St. Louis we travel right across the state of Missouri to Kansas City, almost three hundred miles. Our train moves so fast across the level country that the hand-clasped strangers seem like closely placed pickets in an endless fence, but still the line is there and we must travel one hundred miles across Kansas before the last of that endless chain waves us farewell. And all these have come in ten years. _The Italian Compared with Former Immigrants._ The earliest immigration to America was not that of the peasant class. “It was the middle class tradesman and the stout, independent yeoman.” The immigration of a few years ago, as is well known, was from Northern Europe, bringing the German, the Scotch, the English, the Irish, the Welsh and the Scandinavian. These were races from the temperate zone who had gained culture and the virtues of a Christian civilization, largely Protestant, through long centuries of intelligent struggle. The Italian immigrant of today is from Southern Italy. The Northern Italian, more skilled and better educated, does not come to the United States in any large numbers; his goal is mainly Argentina and Brazil, in South America. The Italians from Sicily have lacked educational advantages. If, when they land at the Battery from Ellis Island, you asked them to read the name of the street upon the lamp post, sixty out of every hundred would shake their heads. In the public schools the Italian is by no means so clever as some of the other immigrants, nor is he employing his leisure time in so wise a manner as is the Jew, for instance.