In Pennsylvania it is the mining towns which furnished recruits for this landward movement.  In some of the counties an exchange of population has been taking place for a decade or more.  The land dwelling Americans are moving into the towns and cities.  The farms are offered for sale.  Enterprising Slavic real estate dealers are not slow in persuading their fellow countrymen to invest their savings in land.

The Slavonic infiltration has been most marked in New England, especially in the Connecticut Valley.  From manufacturing centers like Chicopee, Worcester, Ware, Westfield, and Fitchburg, areas of Polish settlements radiate in every direction, alien spokes from American hubs.  Here are little farming villages ready made in attractive settings whose vacant houses invite the alien peasant.  A Polish family moves into a sedate colonial house; often a second family shares the place, sometimes a third or a fourth, each with a brood of children and often a boarder or two.  The American families left in the neighborhood are scandalized by this promiscuity, by the bare feet and bare heads, by the unspeakable fare, the superstition and credulity, and illiteracy and disregard for sanitary measures, and by the ant-like industry from starlight to starlight.  Old Hadley has become a prototype of what may become general if this racial infiltration is not soon checked.  In 1906 the Poles numbered one-fifth of the population in that town, owned one-twentieth of the land, and produced two-thirds of the babies.  Dignified old streets that formerly echoed with the tread of patriots now resound to the din of Polish weddings and christenings, and the town that sheltered William Goffe, one of the judges before whom Charles I was tried, now houses Polish transients at twenty-five cents a bed weekly.

The transient usually returns to Europe, but the landowner remains.  His kind is increasing yearly.  It is even probable that in a generation he will be the chief landowner of the Connecticut Valley.  It will take more than an association of old families, determined on keeping the ancient homes in their own hands, to check this transformation.

The process of racial replacement is most rapid in the smaller manufacturing towns.  In the New England mills the Yankee gave way to the Irish, the Irish gave way to the French Canadian, and the French Canadian has been largely superseded by the Slav and the Italian.  Every one of the older industrial towns has been encrusted in layer upon layer of foreign accretions, until it is difficult to discover the American core.  Everywhere are the physiognomy, the chatter, and the aroma of the modern steerage.  Lawrence, Massachusetts, is typical of this change.  In 1848 it had 5923 inhabitants, of whom 63.3 per cent were Americans, 36 per cent were Irish, and about forty white persons belonged to other nationalities.  In 1910 the same city had 85,000 inhabitants, of whom only about 14 per cent were Americans, and the rest foreigners, two-thirds of the old and one-third of the new immigration.