]
[Footnote 32: _History of the People of the United States_, vol. VII,
p. 203.]
[Footnote 33: K.C. Babcock, _The Scandinavian Element in the United
States_, p. 143.]
CHAPTER VIII
THE CITY BUILDERS
"What will happen to immigration when the public domain has vanished?"
was a question frequently asked by thoughtful American citizens. The
question has been answered: the immigrant has become a job seeker in
the city instead of a home seeker in the open country. The last three
decades have witnessed "the portentous growth of the cities"--and they
are cities of a new type, cities of gigantic factories, towering
skyscrapers, electric trolleys, telephones, automobiles, and motor
trucks, and of fetid tenements swarming with immigrants. The
immigrants, too, are of a new type. When Henry James revisited Boston
after a long absence, he was shocked at the "gross little foreigners"
who infested its streets, and he said it seemed as if the fine old
city had been wiped with "a sponge saturated with the foreign mixture
and passed over almost everything I remembered and might have still
recovered."[34]
Until 1882 the bulk of immigration, as we have seen, came from the
north of Europe, and these immigrants were kinsmen to the American and
for the most part sought the country.
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