With all their cunning as
traders, they respect learning, prize manual skill, possess a fine
artistic sense, and are law-abiding. The Armenians especially are
eager to become American citizens. Since the settlement of the
Northwestern lands, many thousands of Scandinavians and Finns have
flocked to the cities, where they are usually employed as skilled
craftsmen.[44]
Thus the United States, in a quarter of a century, has assumed a
cosmopolitanism in which the early German and Irish immigrants appear
as veteran Americans. This is not a stationary cosmopolitanism, like
that of Constantinople, the only great city in Europe that compares
with New York, Chicago, or Boston in ethnic complexity. It is a
shifting mass. No two generations occupy the same quarters. Even the
old rich move "up town" leaving their fine houses, derelicts of a
former splendor, to be divided into tenements where six or eight
Italian or Polish families find ample room for themselves and a crowd
of boarders.
Thousands of these migratory beings throng the steerage of
transatlantic ships every winter to return to their European homes.
The steamship companies, whose enterprise is largely responsible for
this flow of populations, reap their harvest; and many a decaying
village buried in the southern hills of Europe, or swept by the winds
of the great Slav plains, owes its regeneration ultimately to American
dollars.
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