and this almost invariably means a violation of the law against overcrowding. It should also be pointed out that the differences between this district and several others to which reference might be made, are differences in degree rather than in kind. No other industry is just like the packing industry, but there are many industrial establishments which dominate the neighborhoods in which they are located in much the same way as the packing industry dominates this. Houses of the same general type prevail in other districts, and the people are like those near the Stockyards, immigrant men and women drawn here to render the unskilled service upon which so much of Chicago's industry depends.

The homes of this district have always been workmen's homes. Small frame cottages have gradually been displaced or outnumbered by tenements built for two or more families; but it has continued to be almost solidly occupied by those who depend upon the yards for work and upon whose work the industry, in turn, remains dependent.

In this district, as might be expected, were found representatives of the various nationalities upon which the packing industry had from time to time depended. In the earlier days, the workers in the yards and the dwellers in the neighborhood were almost exclusively Irish; but as they gradually found their way into higher-grade work, they were succeeded first by the Germans and later by the Slavs, who, in the last decade, have been immigrating in increasingly large numbers.

Two groups of blocks were selected for a house-to-house canvass, one Polish and one Lithuanian, and an attempt was made to select those which contained, not the poorest, but the typical homes of this neighborhood. To these were added the thin, straggling line of houses along Ashland Avenue known as "Whiskey Row," because it was believed that many lodgers would be found here, and because this was also believed to be typical of streets in other similar districts. The accompanying map shows the whole neighborhood in its relation to the blocks investigated.

The following table, which indicates how largely Slavic the

population back of the yards has become, is given by blocks because it shows how the Poles and Lithuanians tend to segregate. The blocks which contain the largest number of Poles contain relatively few Lithuanians, while the blocks which are predominately Lithuanian have very few Poles.

NATIONALITY OF HEADS OF HOUSEHOLDS

No column is given to Americans in the table, for out of 1,562 families visited only 19 American families were found. It is of interest, too, that so few Irish are left and that a disproportionate number of these are in Whiskey Row. These surviving Irish residents were usually either among the most prosperous or the most shiftless families in the neighborhood. The former are often firemen or policemen who have remained in the same neighborhood but have prospered equally with those who have moved away. The Irish who have gone down and are still in the district because they have never been prosperous enough to get away, are usually living in very dilapidated and untidy houses, It should be added that a few other Irish families are left, too, because they unwisely bought their homes and have never been able to dispose of them satisfactorily.

The fact of chief interest in the table, however, is that 1,167 out of 1,562 heads of households are Polish or Lithuanian. When the large numbers of Polish and Lithuanian lodgers are added to these family groups, it is clear that this is now a district

AN EXCEPTIONALLY CLEAN ONE-ROOM APARTMENT

In a rear house, occupied by a man, his wife, and two children. (The woman at the left was a visitor.)

almost exclusively made up of Slavic immigrants, many of them newly arrived and unable to speak any English. The problem of the adjustment of the newly arrived immigrant is very closely connected with the housing problem. It almost uniformly happens that the families which are most foreign are most exploited in the matter of their housing situation. They pay the highest rents for the poorest apartments, and they seem quite unable to understand that they have a right to insist on needed repairs or a decent standard of cleanliness. If a roof leaks, or the plumbing is out of order, they have no idea how to set about getting the landlord to attend to it. The student investigators who made the house-to-house canvass reported that their authority was rarely questioned among the less Americanized groups; the people were uniformly submissive, and apparently it never occurred to them that they had a right to ask why strangers could come in and measure their doors and windows.

It is a well-known fact that the unskilled work in the yards is largely done by the members of these foreign groups. Additional evidence, however, is found in the following table which shows that of the 876 heads of families (men) whose occupations were learned, only 152 did work requiring any considerable degree of skill.

TABLE SHOWING OCCUPATION OF MALE HEADS OF HOUSEHOLDS

Most of the lodgers, both men and women, also worked in the yards, but it was not possible to find out how many married women were employed in this or in any other kind of work. When the woman was away from the home, the children and neighbors frequently did not know whether she was at work or not, and the returns, therefore, as to the employment of the women, were too incomplete to be valuable. Sometimes married women, even those with children, worked in the yards, but these seemed