On the other hand, they tend to crowd, their standards of cleanliness are low and they are greatly afflicted with _trachoma_, an excludable eye disease. Their narrow range of interests throws out in ugly relief their lust of gain, especially gain without sweat. The Oriental attitude toward females shows itself in a great difference between the sexes in illiteracy, and in the betrothal of young girls to mature men whom they scarcely know. These people love trade, particularly the individual bargain, which offers scope for what is amiably called "a contest of wits" but is really the ensnaring of the unsuspecting by the spider type. At a time when our retail commerce has happily come to the "one-price" system, the lustrous-eyed peddlers from the Levant bring in again the odious haggling trade with its deceit and trickery. [Illustration: A Finnish Woman by her Cabin of Hewn Logs in Northern Wisconsin near Lake Superior] [Illustration: Courtesy of The Survey Some of Syracuse's Newer Citizens--a Greek and Two Turks] That these immigrants lack physical and moral courage is conceded even by their friends. They do not settle their quarrels on the spot face to face but revenge themselves treacherously from behind when they get a safe chance. Their feeling that truth is a luxury not to be brought out on common occasions gives them an advantage in a commercial system which takes for granted a good deal of Anglo-Saxon straightforwardness. It needs but half an eye to see that the "business ability" attributed to the prospering dealer is often nothing but the practice of Oriental craft among the unsuspicious. As the Romans found these people at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, so we find them to-day, good looking, pliant, clever, sometimes brilliant, but shifty and wanting in character. When two peoples find that their standards repel like oil and water, they do not care to associate. Naturally, then, the Oriental immigrants tend to huddle in colonies in which they may live in the old way, keep their pride and spare themselves the pains of adjustment to American ideals. Not only do such colonies check the assimilation of those who most need it, but they are apt to be nests of congestion, disease and depravity, as well as hot-beds for the propagation of false and impractical ideas of political and social freedom. CHAPTER IX ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF IMMIGRATION