The immigration from Italy has shot up like Jonah's gourd. During the last decade a fourth of our immigrants have been Italians, and from being a twentieth part of our foreign-born, they have risen to be a tenth. This freshet is not born of religious or political oppression, for Italy enjoys a government on modern lines, created by the efforts of patriots like Mazzini, Cavour, and Garibaldi. The impulse that every year prompts from a quarter to a half of a million Italians to wander oversea is purely economic. Ignorance and the subjection of women cause blind multiplication, with the result that the Italians are wresting their food from narrower plots than any other European people. A population approximating that of all our Atlantic States is trying to live from a space little greater than the combined areas of New York and Georgia. Although Argentina seconds the United States in absorbing the overflow, still, Italy's population continually swells, her birth-rate is not sinking so rapidly as her death-rate, and one sees no reason why the Italian dusk should not in time quench what of the Celto-Teutonic flush lingers in the cheek of the native American. DISTRIBUTION THROUGHOUT THE UNITED STATES Of our one and one-third million of Italians, the Northeast down to Washington holds about three-fourths, while south and southwest of the Capitol there are only three and a half per cent. The middle West has sixteen per cent., and the quota of the Far West is seven and a half per cent. For the most part, they are greatly concentrated in cities. Roughly speaking, five-sixths of the Italians in Delaware are in Wilmington; in Maryland, three-sevenths are in Baltimore; in Illinois, three-eights are in Chicago; in Nebraska, two-thirds are in Omaha; in Missouri, three-fifths are in St. Louis; in Oregon, one-half are in Portland; in Pennsylvania, one-half are in Philadelphia; in Louisiana, two-fifths are in New Orleans; in Michigan, a third are in Detroit; and in Ohio, a quarter are in Cleveland. In New York city are massed a third of a million of Italians, one-fourth of all in the country. Although a slow percolation into the rural districts is going on, this current distributes immigrants very differently from the older streams that debouched on the advancing frontier. SOCIAL CHARACTERISTICS Migratory job-hunters rather than home-seekers, the Italians are loath to encumber themselves with their women. The women are only a little more than one-fifth of the whole, nor do they come here more freely as time goes on. A natural consequence of leaving families behind is a huge return current _to_ Italy, amounting to a third of the arrivals _from_ Italy.