About 300,000 Greeks have come to America between 1908 and 1917, nearly all of them young men, escaping from a country where they had meat three times a year to a land where they may have it three times a day.  “The whole Greek world,” says Henry P. Fairchild, writing in 1911, “may be said to be in a fever of emigration....  The strong young men with one accord are severing home ties, leaving behind wives and sweethearts, and thronging to the shores of America in search of opportunity and fortune.”  Every year they send back handsome sums to the expectant family.  Business is an instinct with the Greek, and he has almost monopolized the ice cream, confectionery, and retail fruit business, the small florist shops and bootblack stands in scores of towns, and in every large city he is running successful restaurants.  As a factory operative he is found in the cotton mills of New England, but he prefers merchandizing to any other calling.

Years ago when New Bedford was still a whaling port a group of Portuguese sailors from the Azores settled there.  This formed the nucleus of the Portuguese immigration which, in the last decade, included over 80,000 persons.  Two-thirds of these live in New England factory towns, the remaining third, strange to say, have found their way to the other side of the continent, where they work in the gardens and fruit orchards of California.  New Bedford is still the center of their activity.  They are a hard-working people whose standard of living, according to official investigations “is much lower than that of any other race,” of whom scarcely one in twenty become citizens, and who evince no interest in learning or in manual skill.

Finally, American cities are extending the radius of their magnetism and are drawing ambitious tradesmen and workers from the Levant.  Over 100,000 have come from Arabia, Syria, Armenia, and Turkey.  The Armenians and Syrians, forming the bulk of this influx, came as refugees from the brutalities of the Mohammedan regime.  The Levantine is first and always a bargainer.  His little bazaars and oriental rug shops are bits of Cairo and Constantinople, where you are privileged to haggle over every purchase in true oriental style.  Even the peddlers of lace and drawn-work find it hard to accustom themselves to the occidental idea of a market price.  With all their cunning as traders, they respect learning, prize manual skill, possess a fine artistic sense, and are law-abiding.  The Armenians especially are eager to become American citizens.  Since the settlement of the Northwestern lands, many thousands of Scandinavians and Finns have flocked to the cities, where they are usually employed as skilled craftsmen.[44]

Thus the United States, in a quarter of a century, has assumed a cosmopolitanism in which the early German and Irish immigrants appear as veteran Americans.  This is not a stationary cosmopolitanism, like that of Constantinople, the only great city in Europe that compares with New York, Chicago, or Boston in ethnic complexity.  It is a shifting mass.  No two generations occupy the same quarters.  Even the old rich move “up town” leaving their fine houses, derelicts of a former splendor, to be divided into tenements where six or eight Italian or Polish families find ample room for themselves and a crowd of boarders.