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Scotch have the largest proportion and thus appear to come and go the most, and that the Scandinavians and Germans also stand high. The Slovaks have nearly as high a rate of those returning as the Irish, in both years; other Slavs have smaller proportions. Jews, as one might expect, come to stay, and go back and forth less than any other class noted.

From these figures we see that while the Slavs, except the Slovaks, are (if the data are correct) less migratory than the average, there is still a large deduction to be made for those entering the country more than once, and in addition to this, for the large though hitherto unknown number who leave and do not return.

Another indication of the discrepancy between immigration totals and net additions to the population is given by a comparison of the figures for immigration with the United States census. Foreign countries sent us, in the decade 1891-1900, 3,687,564 immigrants. The census of 1900, however, shows a gain of foreign born since 1890 of less than a third as many (1,091,729). Part of this difference, but not by any means all of it, is accounted for by deaths among our foreign-born population.

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H. A. MILLIS, PROFESSOR OF ECONOMICS, UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS

HE one thing really settled is that there shall not be a free flow of laborers from such a high pressure country as Japan to the low pressure United States for the mere pecuniary gain of those who come. No country can afford indefinitely to provide the opportunity for draining off an excess of population found elsewhere the diminished numbers to be quickly replaced by a high birth rate. There are few in the United States who will question the wisdom of the principle of restriction rather vigorously applied and most of the Japanese people freely concede it. Japan has for some time been acting upon that principle in restricting emigration directly or indirectly, that is, by way of Mexico and Canada, to the United States. She has applied it also in dealing with Chinese laborers who came to her own shores.

With reference to this matter I wish not to be misunderstood. Until conditions materially change, vigorous restriction of the free movement of laborers from Japan must be taken for granted. It must not be taken for granted, however, because of any alleged inferiority of the Japanese race, for it is not an inferior one. Nor must it be taken for granted because of dependency, disorder, ignorance, or undesirability attaching possibly to some individuals, for there has been no problem of any moment connected with any of these. Nor, again, must it be taken for granted because of gambling or related evils found in some places, for the communities in which such evils have arisen are chiefly to blame for them. Nevertheless, in a practical world restrictions must be taken for granted, because of evils for which no one

1 Printed by The American Sociological Society and The Committee of One Hundred, Federal Council of Churches in America, August, 1915.

in particular was to blame, but connected with the earlier influx and perhaps inherent in a comparatively free movement of immigrants from Eastern Asia to such a country as the United States.

One of the evils experienced and which is indissolubly connected with any considerable immigration of Asiatic laborers, is the conflict of economic standards. We have witnessed it in industry when employment was taken by the Asiatics as section hands and shop and mill laborers at lower wages than others were paid. Seldom, it is true, was the underbidding through the acceptance of lower wages great. The primary reason for the difference of only about twenty or twenty-five cents per day in wages was that the slightly lower sum was sufficient to absorb the numbers available. The wages accepted in Hawaii and elsewhere would indicate that the rates accepted here might have been lower if need be to be effective in securing employment. But when the immigration was greatest, industry was expanding, there was a shortage of labor at the wages then current, and the contractors, working in connection with boarding-houses and other sources of supply, could place their Japanese laborers at the slight discount indicated. Yet that the immigration of Japanese laborers and the organized search for employment previous to 1908 was accompanied by effective underbidding is an established fact. In spite of the expanding industry, a check was placed upon the increase in wages and improvement in labor conditions. That organized labor was the first to protest against the competition was only to be expected, for organized labor stands for the maintenance and improvement of standards. Laborers without organization, also to the best of their limited ability, stood opposed to any impairment of their working conditions.

But the Japanese laborers were employed much more extensively in agriculture than in industrial pursuits such as those just mentioned. They accepted the places vacated by the aging and disappearing Chinese, maintained the old Asiatic labor economy, and extended it to new branches of agriculture as they developed in California and to the sugar industry as it gained an important place in several of the western states. They found employment chiefly as migratory hand laborers in the growing of intensive crops, where much of the work is of the stoop-over

variety and unattractive to white men. They easily found place in such occupations because they were organized by and easily secured through bosses, were easily shifted from place to place as needed, were easily housed and self-subsisting, and, to begin with, always accepted lower wages than white men, whether paid by the day or by the job. They, of course, by reason of their availability, cheapness, and fair efficiency, had not a little to do with the rapid advance of branches of agriculture of an intensive type and of farming communities where the supply of labor was not at all commensurate with the needs of the highly specialized operations most profitable if labor was readily available on favorable terms. Indeed by Asiatic labor not a few of the out-of-the-way places were brought to that state of development where they could be settled by others. In other words, their labor was to a considerable extent supplementary to that of others. Moreover, it must be admitted that their presence made more employment for laborers in some occupations in which they did not themselves compete for work. Yet it is true that there was considerable displacement of other laborers because of the easy terms on which the Japanese could be obtained. The disappearance of the Chinese was hastened by their competition, and in some instances white laborers as well were displaced. The Japanese were effective competitors and generally underbid for work. Moreover, others tended to withdraw as certain agricultural occupations became tainted. My investigations have led me to the conclusion that the economic effects of the employment of the Japanese in agricultural work were (1) to promote certain kinds of farming and to hasten the development of the natural resources, (2) to cause an advance in land values, (3) to retard the subdivision of large holdings and to maintain a certain amount of capitalistic agriculture, (4) to retard the advance in wages of unskilled laborers and to extend the old labor economy, and (5) to give the Japanese a pivotal place in the labor supply, especially in many California communities. As this pivotal place was secured less room was left for the employment of others in certain occupations and they sought work elsewhere.

Most of the Japanese who came to us brought only their hands and sought to better their economic condition as laborers in some

of the lower and more distasteful walks of life. With time, however, a relatively large number became shopkeepers or tenant or landowning farmers. Few races have made the transition as quickly as the Japanese, and in their shopkeeping and farming, differences in standards corresponding to those in wageemployment became evident.

The number of Japanese farmers, most of them tenant, in the West in 1909, was perhaps not far from 6000. Many of their 4000 holdings were not farms, but small plots, so that the combined acreage held by them was perhaps approximately 200,000, about three quarters of it in California. Though this acreage seems to be of little consequence where millions of acres sparsely settled are found in the West, it had perhaps tripled in five years, and the details connected with the rapid progress thus shown were significant of what might be expected to happen were large numbers admitted to the country, and gave rise to fear for the future — especially in those localities in which most of them found place. More recently they have continued to make substantial progress as farmers. It is my opinion that with a large immigration of Asiatics, and especially of Japanese, much of the land would rapidly come into their possession and important changes in the composition and life of agricultural communities settled in would occur. With an immigration problem, an important land problem would inevitably develop. The reasons for this conclusion may be briefly presented.

Numerous things have combined to place a premium on shopkeeping or farming by the versatile and efficient Japanese. The Japanese are ambitious, and the immigrants of every ambitious race tend strongly to rise in the adopted country to the position they occupied in their native land. This is especially true of the Japanese, who find the wage relation distasteful. With them to be a wage earner is to show inferiority; to be economically independent shows merit. Again, their advance as employees to the higher occupations has been made difficult, and this has virtually forced many to leave the wage-earning class in order to advance at all. Most of them have been employed in gangs and limited to work done by gangs. A third important factor is found in the fact that they are a home-loving people and wish to have their families with them. Ordinarily this has been

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