Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919). New York. 1906.
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| straits for food, thousands being supported for short periods by the charity of private citizens and of organized relief associations. They did not go out to the frontier, and like most of the immigrants of the present century preferred to huddle in the large cities rather than to go into the country. Year by year the mass of immigration increased, though with occasional and purely temporary fluctuations. By 1830 it had already become so great as to dwarf all movements of the kind which the world had hitherto seen; and after the potato famine in Ireland and the revolutions of 1848 in continental Europe, fugitives from hunger or political oppression came over by hundreds of thousands. A greater proportion of these immigrants, relatively to the population, made their homes in New York than in any other part of the country. The large majority of them were of course from the lower or lower-middle classes. |
| The immigration worked a complete ethnic overturn in the character of the population,—an overturn of which there had been several similar instances already in the city’s history. The immigrants and their children soon grew to outnumber the descendants of the old pre-Revolutionary inhabitants, and the process was hastened by the fact that very many of the latter, probably far more than half, themselves drifted westward, with the restless love of change so characteristic of their |