ABSTRACT
Likewise in a city slum into which there flowed a steady stream of newcomers from abroad—almost penniless people, ignorant, inexpert, friendless, and unable to speak the language of the country—men and women were likewise imprisoned by circumstance. But in practice poverty, limited skills, and ignorance kept them–the great majority of them–where they were, year after year, to battle fiercely for chances to earn a living, and to accept whatever miserable wage was offered to them. Throughout most of the nineteenth century the proletariat had been coming across the Atlantic. For a time it had been mostly Irish: in the eighteen-forties and -fifties it had been the Irish who were the diggers of ditches, the builders of levees, the mill workers who labored twelve or thirteen or fourteen hours a day for a microscopic wage. During the latter half of the nineteenth century, industrialism had advanced with mighty strides in the United States.
