MALE PAUPERS IN ALMSHOUSES PER MILLION VOTING POPULATION, NORTH ATLANTIC STATES, 1904.
Native white, native parents 2,360 Native white, foreign parents 2,252 Foreign white 5,119 Colored 4,056
Here we see the counterpart of the estimates on crime, for the natives of foreign parentage show a smaller proportion of paupers than the natives of native parentage, while the foreign-born themselves show more than double the relative amount of pauperism of the native element, and the colored paupers are nearly twice the native stock.
The census bureau also furnishes computations showing the contributions of the different races and nationalities to the insane asylums and benevolent institutions.[102] In general it appears that the foreign-born and the negroes exceed the native classes in their burden on the public. A report of the Department of Labor of great value and significance, incidentally bearing on this subject, shows for the Italians in Chicago their industrial and social conditions. According to this report the average earnings of Italians in that city in 1896 while at work were $6.41 per week for men and $2.11 per week for women, and the average time unemployed by the wage-earning element was over seven months. In another report of the Department of Labor it appears that the slum population of the cities of Baltimore, Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia in 1893 was unemployed three months each year. With wages one dollar a day, and employment only five months during the year, it is marvellous that the Italians of Chicago, during the late period of depression, were not thrown in great numbers upon public relief. Yet, with the strict administration of the exclusion laws leading to the deportation of over 2000 Italians a year as liable to become public charges, it is likely that the immigrants of that race, although low in physique, poverty, and standards of living, are fairly well screened of actual paupers.
American democracy was ushered in on a theory of equality. And no word has been more strangely used and abused. There is the monarchical idea of equality, and Mr. Mallock begs the question when he gives the title "Aristocracy and Evolution" to a book on the necessary part played by great men. Doubtless, in Greek, aristocracy means "government by the best," but in history it means government by the privilege of birth and landed property. Democracy may be in philology "government by the mob," but in politics and industry it has been opportunity for great men without blood or property. Mr. Münsterberg, too, sees the breakdown of American democracy and the reaction towards aristocracy in the prominence of civil-service reform, the preëminence conceded to business ability, the deference to wealth, and the conquest of the Philippines.[103] But civil-service reform is only a device for opening the door to merit that has been shut by privilege. In England it was the means by which the mercantile classes broke into the offices preëmpted by the younger sons of aristocracy.[104] In America it is an awkward means of admitting ability wherever found to positions seized upon by political usurpers. It appealed to the American democracy only when its advocates learned to call it, not "civil-service reform," but "the merit system." As for the astonishing power of mere wealth in American affairs the testimony of another English observer is based on wider observation when he says, "Even the tyranny of trusts is not to be compared with the tyranny of landlordism; for the one is felt to be merely an unhappy and (it is hoped) temporary aberration of well-meant social machinery, while the other seems bred in the very bone of the national existence."[105]