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Avenue. Hull-House once stood in the suburbs, but the city has

steadily grown up around it and its site now has corners on three

or four foreign colonies. Between Halsted Street and the river

live about ten thousand Italians —Neapolitans, Sicilians, and

Calabrians, with an occasional Lombard or Venetian. To the

south on Twelfth Street are many Germans, and side streets are

given over almost entirely to Polish and Russian Jews. Still farther south, these Jewish colonies merge into a huge Bohemian

colony, so vast that Chicago ranks as the third Bohemian city in

the world. To the northwest are many Canadian French, clannish

in spite of their long residence in America, and to the north are

Irish and first-generation Americans. On the streets directly west

and farther north are well-to-do English-speaking families, many

of whom own their houses and have lived in the neighborhood

for years; one man is still living in his old farmhouse.

The policy of the public authorities of never taking an initiative, and always waiting to be urged to do their duty, is obviously

fatal in a neighborhood where there is little initiative among the

citizens. The idea underlying our self-government breaks down in

such a ward. The streets are inexpressibly dirty, the number of

schools inadequate, sanitary legislation unenforced, the street

lighting bad, the paving miserable and altogether lacking in the

alleys and smaller streets, and the stables foul beyond description.

Hundreds of houses are unconnected with the street sewer. The

older and richer inhabitants seem anxious to move away as rapidly as they can afford it. They make room for newly arrived

immigrants who are densely ignorant of civic duties. This substitution of the older inhabitants is accomplished industrially also,

in the south and east quarters of the ward. The Jews and Italians

do the finishing for the great clothing manufacturers, formerly

done by Americans, Irish, and Germans, who refused to submit

to the extremely low prices to which the sweating system has reduced their successors. As the design of the sweating system is the

elimination of rent from the manufacture of clothing, the "outside work" is begun after the clothing leaves the cutter. An unscrupulous contractor regards no basement as too dark, no stable

loft too foul, no rear shanty too provisional, no tenement room

too small for his workroom, as these conditions imply low rental.

Hence these shops abound in the worst of the foreign districts

where the sweater easily finds his cheap basement and his home

finishers.