Mitchell that $600 a year is little enough for an American workman. It is a proposition which I believe no member of the Senate will dispute. In that light consider what these rates of trackmen's wages mean. If a man was never sick a day, if he was never laid off a day on account of bad weather or lack of material, or for any other reason, if no sickness in his family, no private business ever kept him from his work, if he never took a working day in the whole year round for recreation, then, at $1.39 a day, he would get about $425 in a year; at $1.31, about $400; at $1.16, about $350.

Try to imagine what it means to support a family on $425 a year; on $400; on $350!

Try to imagine what it means when sickness comes to such a home, when for so much as one week the miserable pittance is cut off.

It is such rates as these that our railroad owners pay their men. And they dare to come here and talk about scarcity of labor.

A quarter of a century ago the anthracite coal barons felt a "need of labor," just as these men feel it now-that is, the sturdy Americans, and English, and Welsh, and Irish that filled the mines would not work cheap enough. There were no immigration laws to trouble, and the "need of labor" was satisfied by importing contract labor cheap enough to suit the coal owners' ideas of what labor ought to get. Some of the results of that policy are now before the country.

Far be it from me to speak against those contract laborers or against their fellows who have followed them, and who, with them, now work in the Pennsylvania mines. No men could make a more heroic struggle than they have made during the past summer for a living wage and decent conditions of employment. One of them said in the midst of that time of hunger: "We spoiled this country; now we are going to make it." With an efficient labor organization, with the general help of organized labor, and with the support of an enlightened public opinion, outside the working class, they will make it. They will make it in spite of "the Christian men to whom God, in his infinite wisdom, has committed the property interests of this country." But in their coming they did spoil it. They did depress wages and conditions of work to a level that America had never known before. It is in their interest, now that they are struggling upward-it is in their interest, no less than in the interest of other Americans, that I beg you to increase, in some degree, the "need of labor," in order that the worker may be able to get some tolerable share of the product of his work.

Even the lords of the railroads can hardly have felt a "need of labor " from 1893 to 1897. We must expect to see hard times again. It was pointed out by Mr. Anderson that when wages fall and employment grows harder to get, immigration decreases. But even so the hundreds of thousands who have come during the good times are here to add to the depression of the labor market when times are bad.

This is obvious. But there is a further effect which is not so often thought of. This effect is thus stated in the final report of the Industrial Commission, on page 964.

"The great increase in the number of immigrants just at the time when employment is increasing, many of them expecting to return to their native land, furnishes an artificial supply of labor, and prevents those already at hand from demanding and securing that increase in wages which they could otherwise obtain. This, in turn, has serious ulterior effects on the duration of the period of prosperity. Employers are able both to expand more greatly their production for the immediate emergency, and to secure in the form of profits a greater share of

the product than they would be able to do without this artificial increase of cheap labor. The result is a quick overproduction of commodities, owing to the inability of the working population, when prices have risen more than wages, to purchase and consume the same proportion of their product as that to which they have been accustomed." We hear much talk of the need of foreign markets. The thing we ought rather to seek is a full market at home, and the way to get it is to enable our own workers to buy what their labor produces. The wage earner consumes all that the conditions of the labor market allow him to get hold of. Increase his wages and he will take care that you are not troubled with overproduction or underconsumption. But overproduction or underconsumption is generally agreed to be the cause of our recurring crises and depressions. The remedy for depression is to increase the purchasing power of wage earners by raising their wages. Whatever increases the "need of labor" is a step in that direction. It is therefore in the interest of the whole people, in the interest of a steady continuance of prosperity, that I ask that whatever course will increase the "need of labor" be pursued.

2. I have anticipated something of what I should wish to say regarding the second class of arguments against the educational test, the propositions which are reducible to this: That the test would not effect a restriction or discrimination which would be useful to the country.

I hold that it is most essential to the well being of the Republic that the higest possible intelligence should be maintained among the body of her citizens. It is unjust to ourselves, paying millions of dollars annually for the education of our own people, to dilute their intelligence with the ignorance of strangers to the number of millions every decade. Every man who aspires to American citizenship should obtain the small measure of education which it is proposed to require; and it is better for him, as well as for the country which he seeks to enter, that he should be compelled to get it. And even the countries from which the immigrants come may be spurred, by the standard which we set up, to provide better facilities for the education of their people, to the profit of those who remain at home as well as of those who come to us.

As a representative of American labor, however, I wish to confine myself to the relations which the question bears to the American labor market.

The American Federation of Labor does not advocate the educational test for immigrants from prejudice against any race. We demand it because it will help in some degree to keep up American wages.

Whatever you increase the supply of you lower the price. To increase the supply of unorganized labor is to lower wages. That is the reason our benevolent railroads want to increase the supply.

An increase of the supply of unorganized labor tends to lower wages, no matter what its intelligence, no matter what its efficiency, no matter what wages it is accustomed to receive. But when its character in all these respects is high the adverse effect may not be noticeable.

When the labor market is invaded by hundreds of thousands of men, unacquainted with the principles of labor organization, accustomed to low wages, and of such general ignorance as to be affected only very slowly by new ideas, the effect on wages is ruinous. I have referred to the anthracite miners. The manufacture of ready-made clothing is another field of labor which illustrates well, by the misery of its sweatshop workers, the effects of such an immigration. And, while it is easier to identify the effects of unrestricted immigration in those occupations which the newer immigrants have made their own, the effect exists

throughout the labor field. The English and the Irish who are crowded out of the mines by the cheap labor of Italians and Slavs, the Germans and the Scandinavians who are driven from the clothing shops by the cheap labor of Italians and Hebrews, must compete with their fellows in other occupations, and their competition must bring wages down, or, at the best, must make it increasingly hard for our labor organizations to bring wages up. The pressure propagates itself from one trade to another, like the pressure of water in connecting pipes; and there is no trade that escapes the depressing influence.

Out of the very wretchedness which these unfortunate immigrants bring upon the trades they flock into, out of the very despair into which they bring themselves and those who compete with them, there comes at last a turning to labor organization, and a struggle for American conditions. This is what we are seeing in the coal mines. Similar struggles are going on in the clothing trades. But here appears again the burden of an unchecked immigration. As fast as one lot of immigrants begin to make a stand for conditions approaching those which every American worker ought to have, they find a horde of newer arrivals upon their backs, pulling them down exactly as they pulled down those who went before them.

I am not criticizing any race. I am not denying that there is good stuff in every people that seeks our shores. I am not raising the question whether the best of citizens may not be made of any of them when they have had time to develop on American soil and have had a chance. I am saying, Give them a chance. Give a chance to those that are here. They are of us. Give them a chance to become what Americans ought to be. Do not, either to satisfy the "need of labor” of our capitalists, or from an overgenerous hope of helping our brothers across the sea, place grievous burdens on both native and foreign-born Americans.

The tariff keeps out goods, the product of European labor. The employer has goods to sell, and the tariff protects him. The workingman does not sell goods, he sells labor; and against the importation of cheap labor, he, in his turn, asks for some small protection.

The administrative features of your bill might perhaps keep out some few hundreds of diseased persons and paupers beyond those that would be kept out by the existing law. That is well. It does not, however, offer any relief to the labor market. The only thing in this bill that promises any help in maintaining American wages is the educational test. In the name of millions of American workingmen, organized in the American Federation of Labor, I ask for this little measure of protection.

STATEMENT OF CHARLES E. EDGERTON, ASSISTANT SECRETARY IMMIGRATION RESTRICTION LEAGUE.

Mr. EDGERTON. Mr. Chairman, representatives of the Immigration Restriction League presented some facts to this committee last spring, showing the great change for the worse which has taken place in recent years in the character of our immigrants. I desire to lay before you some facts which are of later date or were not then available, showing more fully the tendencies to which attention was then called and their effects, the increase of the less desirable classes of immigrants, and their crowding into the congested districts.

The following table gives some of the principal data for the immigra

tion of the fiscal year ending June 30, 1902, with comparisons with previous years:

Comparison of the fiscal years ending June 30, 1900, 1901, and 1902.

Per cent of illiterate in total immigration over 14 years of age Per cent of total immigration coming from Austria-Hungary, Italy, and Russia

96

113

283

95, 673

117,645

165, 105

Per cent of total immigration coming from the United Kingdom,
France, Germany, and Scandinavia

Average money brought by immigrants

Per cent of total immigration having no occupation, including women and children

Per cent of total immigration who were farm laborers, laborers, or servants

It will be noticed that the proportion of the total immigration coming from Eastern Europe increases while that from Western Europe continues to diminish. The percentage of illiteracy also tends to increase.

ILLITERACY.

Number of persons in each hundred immigrants over 14 years of age who can not write or can not read and write their own language, from those races (not nations) which contributed upward of 2,000 immigrants to the United States during any of the past three fiscal years.

Number of persons in each hundred immigrants over 14 years of age, etc.—Continued.

A comparison of immigration returns for the months of July, August, September, and October in 1902 with the corresponding period in 1901 shows an increase this year of 65,926, or over 45 per cent. During the month of October of this year no less than 63,614 immigrants were landed on our shores, and by far the largest number came from southern and eastern Europe and from Asia. Last year nearly one-fourth of the total immigration came from the south of Italy. In October, 1902, the number of south Italians coming here was 15,806. Of this number 7,832, or nearly 50 per cent, were illiterate.

The present fiscal year promises to bring the largest influx of immigrants that we have ever received, and the great majority of them are of the races that are least suited, by inheritance and training, to make desirable citizens of the United States.

The last census shows the change that has already taken place in the character of our foreign-born population.

The following table gives the increase and the decrease from 1890 to 1900 of persons in the United States born in certain countries and groups of countries; the increase of the natives of the several countries and groups of countries; per cent of the number found in the United States in 1900, and the proportion which the increase of the natives of each country or group of countries bears to the aggregate increase of foreign-born persons in the United States.