The French Quarter of New York [pp. 61-69]

TirE FREArCir QUARTER OF NEW YORK. [April,
the passers~by, and the national physiognomy, which defies disguise, the casual visitor to the French quarter of New York
might thread its uninviting thoroughfares without suspecting
that he was in the midst of an alien population.
Yet, for all their changed externals, the French of New York
are thoroughly French from the skin inwards. In essential
habits and in nearly all their ideas they are less modified by their
surroundings than any other of the foreign elements, save per.
haps the Chinese. Here, be it understood, we speak of the
French of Celtic race. The Alsatians, who form such a large
portion of the "colony," amalgamate readily enough with the
native population. Like all bilingual peoples, they pick up a
third tongue readily. They are not fixtures in the French
quarter, being helped to employment all through the city by
their knowledge of German. The genuine Frenchman, on the
other hand, is practically confined to the limits of the district
where his language is understood. On arriving he generally
makes a desperate but short-lived effort to master the speech of
the country. As a rule he gives up the distasteful task soon.
There is a free school intended for his benefit in Thirteenth Street,
but the scholars, plenty as blackberries when the session opens,
may be counted on the fingers at its close four months later.
Having acquired a certain familiarity with the most energetic
expletives in the English language, the French immigrant puts
his abbreviated Ollendorff on the shelf and concludes that his
professor does not know how to teach. Others, more modest,
shrug their shoulders and say that "Frenchmen have no talent
for language." The fact simply is that they have no idea of the
price an adult must pay for fluency in a tongue hitherto strange
to him.
One of the results of the French immigrant's ignorance of
English has been mentioned. He practically becomes a unit in
a small community isolated in the midst of a vast, busy population to which he is a stranger. Small as the French immigration
is, that portion of it which becomes fixed in New York is out of
proportion to the demand for labor. The I?arisian ouvrfrr has
left a city of two millions and a quarter for a French town in
America a hundred times less populous. When he gets employ
ment he is not as well paid as English-speaking workmen, and he
is constantly out of work. The change is for him generally the
reverse of an improvement. The higher wages are swallowed up
by the excess of idle time. The immigrant has to give up the
wine which he invariably took with his meals while the money