IMMINGRANTS
"Catholic immingrants were almost without exception, poor. Driven from Ireland and Germany by famine or oppression, they were glad, on their arrival to get any kind of work, and the work they took up was usually the hardest and least lucrative kind: out on the railroad tracks or in the grimy railroad shops, in the streets of the city or in the fields. They were the poorest of the poor of their day and generation. As we look back at it from the distance of half a century, the marvel is how men who received but the slender dollar-a- day of the average immigrant, with a growing family to support, and newly- purchased home to pay for, could, nevertheless, contribute not only to the building of churches and the support of pastors, but to the building of school house and the support of Catholic School System and Catholic teachers as well . . . . Burns: THE GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE CATHOLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM IN THE UNITED STATES, pp. 14-5, 1912