was a strike of Americanized Irish, Germans, and Bohemians in behalf of Slovaks, Poles, and Lithuanians. . . . This substitution of races in the Stockyards has been a continuing process for twenty years. The older nationalities have already disappeared from the unskilled occupations and the substitution has evidently run along the line of lower standard of living. The latest arrivals, the Lithuanians and Slovaks, are probably the most oppressed of the peasants of Europe.

Those who attended the crowded meetings of last summer and heard the same address successively translated by interpreters into six or eight languages, who saw the respect shown to the most uncouth of the speakers by the skilled American men who represented a distinctly superior standard of life and thought, could never doubt the power of the labor organizations for amalgamation, whatever opinion they might hold concerning their other values. This may be said in spite of the fact that great industrial disturbances have arisen from the undercutting of wages by the lowering of racial standard. Certainly the most notable of these have taken place in these industries and at those places in which the importation of immigrants has been deliberately fostered as a wage-lowering weapon, and even in those disturbances and under the shock and strain of a long strike disintegration did not come along the line of race cleavage.

HOW UNIONS BLEND THE RACES

It may further be contended that this remarkable coming together has been the result of economic pressure and is without merit or idealism, that the trades-union record on Chinese exclusion and negro discrimination has been damaging, and yet I would quote from a study of the anthracite coal fields made from the University of Pennsylvania:

The United Mine Workers of America is taking men of a score of nationalities - English-speaking and Slavmen of widely different creeds, languages, and customs, and of varying powers of industrial competition, and is welding them into an industrial brotherhood, each part of which can at least understand of the others that they are working for one great and common end. This bond of unionism is stronger than one can readily imagine who has not seen its mysterious workings or who has not been a victim of its members' newly found

enthusiasm. It is to-day the strongest tie that can bind together 147,000 mine workers and the thousands dependent upon them. It is more than religion, more than the social ties which hold together members of the same community.

This is from a careful study by Mr. Warne, which doubtless many of you know, called "The Slav Invasion."

HUMAN PROBLEMS OF THE STRIKE COMMISSION

It was during a remarkable struggle on the part of this amalgamation of men from all countries, that the United States government in spite of itself was driven to take a hand in an industrial situation, owing to the long strain and the intolerable suffering entailed upon the whole country, but even then public opinion was too aroused, too moralized to be patient with an investigation of the mere commercial questions of tonnage and freight rates with their political implications, and insisted that the national commission should consider the human aspects of the case. Columns of newspapers and days of investigation were given to the discussion of the deeds of violence, having nothing to do with the original demands of the strikers, and entering only into the value set upon human life by each of the contesting parties; did the union encourage violence against nonunion men, or did it really do everything to suppress it, living up to its creed, which was to maintain a standard of living that families might be properly housed and fed and protected from debilitating toil and disease, that children might be nurtured into American citizenship; did the operators protect their men as far as possible from mine damp, from length of hours proven by experience to be exhausting; did they pay a sufficient wage to the mine laborer to allow him to send his children to school; questions such as these, a study of the human problem, invaded the commission day after day during its sitting. One felt for the moment the first wave of a rising tide of humanitarianism, until the normal ideals of the laborer to secure food and shelter for his family and security for his old age, and a larger opportunity for his children, become the ideals of democratic government.

NEW IDEALISM OF SIMPLE FOLK

It may be owing to the fact that the working man is brought in direct contact with the situation as a desperate problem of living wage or starvation, it may be that wisdom is at her old trick of residing in the hearts of the simple, or that this new idealism which is that of a reasonable life and labor must from the very nature of things proceed from those who labor, or possibly because amelioration arises whence it is so sorely needed, but certainly it is true, that while the rest of the country talks of assimilation as if we were a huge digestive apparatus, the man with whom the immigrant has come most sharply into competition has been forced into fraternal relations with him.

All the peoples of the world have become part of our tribunal, and their sense of pity, their clamor for personal kindness, their insistence upon the right to join in our progress, cannot be disregarded. The burdens and sorrows of men have unexpectedly become intelligible and urgent to this nation, and it is only by accepting them with some magnanimity that we can develop the larger sense of justice which is becoming world-wide and is lying in ambush, as it were, to manifest itself in governmental relations. Men of all nations are determining upon the abolition of degrading poverty, disease, and intellectual weakness with their resulting industrial inefficiency. This manifests itself in labor legislation in England, in the Imperial Sick and OldAge Insurance Acts of Germany, in the enormous system of public education in the United States.

CONTEMPORANEOUS PATRIOTISM

To be afraid of it is to lose what we have. A government has always received feeble support from its constituents as soon as its demands appeared childish or remote. Citizens inevitably neglect or abandon civic duty when it no longer embodies their genuine desires. It is useless to hypnotize ourselves by unreal talk of colonial ideals and patriotic duty toward immigrants as if it were a question of passing a set of resolutions. The nation must be saved by its lovers, by the patriots who possess adequate and contemporaneous knowledge. A commingling of racial

habits and national characteristics in the end must rest upon the voluntary balance and concord of many forces.

We may with justice demand from the scholar the philosophic statement, the reconstruction and reorganization of the knowledge which he possesses, only if we agree to make it over into healthy and direct expressions of free living.

MR.

I. HISTORY

COLONIZATION AND IMMIGRATION 1

EDWARD EVERETT

R. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN OF THE HISTORICAL SOCIETY: Although I appear before you at the season at which the various religious, moral, and philanthropic societies usually hold their annual meetings to discuss the stirring and controverted topics of the day, I need not say to you that the proprieties of this occasion require me to abstain from such subjects; and to select a theme falling, to some extent at least, within the province of an historical society. I propose, accordingly, this evening, to attempt a sketch of the history of the discovery and colonization of America and of immigration to the United States. I can of course offer you, within the limits of a single address, but a most superficial view of so vast a subject; but I have thought that even a sketch of a subject, which concerns us so directly and in so many ways, would suggest important trains of reflection to thoughtful minds. Words written or spoken are at best but a kind of shorthand, to be filled up by the reader or hearer. I shall be gratified if, after honoring my hasty sketch with your kind attention, you shall deem it worth filling up from your own stores of knowledge and thought. You will forgive me, if, in the attempt to give a certain completeness to the narrative, I shall be led to glance at a few facts, which, however interesting, may seem to you too familiar for repetition.

In the last quarter of the fifteenth century, an Italian mariner, a citizen of the little republic of Genoa, who had hitherto gained his livelihood as a pilot in the commercial marine of different countries, made his appearance successively at various

1 A lecture delivered before the New York Historical Society, in Metropolitan Hall, on the first of June, 1853.