To complete this grouping, we should go one step further, and make up a number of divisions according to occupation and no-occupation, skilled and unskilled labor. To begin with, the unskilled laborers would fill a city of 430,000, or about the size of Cincinnati. Those classified as servants, with a fair question mark as to the amount of skill possessed, numbered 125,000 more, equal to the population of New Haven. Those classified as without occupation, including the children under fourteen, numbered 232,000, equal to the population of Louisville. Gathering into one great body, then, what may fairly be called unskilled labor, the total is not far from 780,000 out of the 1,026,499 who came. This mass would fill a city the size of Boston, Cambridge, and Lynn combined, or of Cleveland and Washington. Imagine, if you can, what kind of a city it would be, and contrast that with these centers of civilization as they now are.
[Sidenote: Whole States Equaled in Numbers]
To put all the emphasis possible upon these facts, consider that the immigration of a single year exceeded by 26,000 the population of Connecticut, which has been settled and growing ever since early colonial days. It exceeded by 37,000 the combined population of Alaska, Arizona, Nevada, Idaho, Wyoming, and Utah. These immigrants would have repopulated whole commonwealths, but they would hardly be called commonwealths in that case. If such immigrant distribution could be made, how quickly would the imperative necessity of Americanization be realized. The Italians who came during the year would exceed the combined population of Alaska and Wyoming. The Hungarians and Slavs would replace the present population of New Hampshire, or of North Dakota, and equal that of Vermont and Wyoming together. The Russian Jews and Finlanders would replace the people of Arizona. The army of illiterates would repeople Delaware and Nevada. And the much larger army of the unskilled would exceed by 50,000 the population of Maine, that of Colorado by about 80,000, and twice that of the District of Columbia.
The diagram at the end of the book, taken from the Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration for 1905, will help us to fix in mind the race proportions of the present immigration. The increase of 1905 over 1904 was 213,629. Almost one half of this was from Austria-Hungary, and all of it was from four countries, the other three being Russia, Italy, and the United Kingdom. There was a decrease from Germany, Sweden, and Norway.