industries at present, as against three or four hundred industries in those days! Barring, again, exceptional centers into which unskilled labor has dropped, our standard of living-wages, hours, and conditions-has been improved by immigration to the present moment; again, for the plain reason that these newcomers have added so much to that general wealth from which wages are paid. Indeed, the whole study of race migrations has gone far enough to bring out the dominant fact that economic causes are at the heart of these movements. Adventure has played its part, and war (with plunder for its aim) a still greater part; but plunder was the economics of the barbarian, while the lode-star guiding the world's most romantic adventure was the glitter of precious metals. It is even a little chilling to learn that the most gallant of these explorers, from Columbus down, did not for a moment forget that they were out for "the dust of the gods." If, for simplicity, we exclude the war element in migrations, we have the main fact that some millions of people yearly change their habitations on the planet wholly for economic reasons. They believe that they can raise the standard of living through migration, and so far as our own immigration problem is concerned, this is too clear to require proof. If, for a moment, we look at the results of this migration into the United Stateslook at it strictly from the human or world point of view, who would question for an instant that it stood for results that enlarge opportunity and progress? The world has been the gainer. Let us cling to this big and cheering fact. We will hold to it until our fearsome opponents show us far better evidence than they have yet given that the world's good is our ill. Let them convince us that the good of Sweden, Italy, Greece, and Hungary, in respect of immigration, is set over against our own good. We see the incalculable benefit to them. Let the alarmists make clear to us the consequent injury to this country. They have thus far done two things. They have created out of the imagination a thousand evils that have not arrived; they have, secondly, fixed attention upon various accidental ills which never fail to shadow every great human activity. What a swarm of mischiefs beset trade and democracy! Yet we do not propose to discontinue trade or give up democracy. The moral and social problem is rather the oldest one of the world-that of separating abuses from uses. The opponents point to city congestion, to heightened insanity, and to certain forms of crime. They are all present, and they have been increased by immigration; yet they are exceptional, and should be dealt with strictly as such, and quite apart from the totality of the movement. It is this large human side of immigration, through which we are related to the whole realm of ideal values that connect themselves with the free and friendly movement, which brings races long enough into contact to know one another and to tolerate differences. The supreme world question is that of races learning the highest and most difficult art of civilization; that of living together with good will and intelligence-living together so that they may help one another rather than exploit or despoil one another. The United States is helping to solve that problem in the only conceivable way; namely, by giving the races a chance to live together long enough to substitute human and social habits for mere clannish and tribal habits. What is now the mother-mischief in our race relationships? Obviously the shadow of an extremely vulgar ignorance and prejudice, one race against another. Think of two nations as advanced as England and France living century after century hard by each other, and, until the most recent years, having merely contempt for each other-the average Englishman honestly thinking that a Frenchman was a kind of monkey with clothes on, and that chiefly because he had a different manner and speech from the English! By what plummet, then, are we likely to measure the depths of ignorance that separate the white from the yellow races? Japan has already done something to show us the density of our prejudice about a portion of the East. China has doubtless quite as startling surprises for us. An Australian prime minister, who knows the Chinese, opposed their admission-not because they were a low race, but because of their ability. They are a "superior set of people," he said, belonging "to an old, deeprooted civilization. We know how wonderful are their powers of imagination, their endurance, and their patient labor." Whereever they have been fairly dealt with in this country, their standards of living very rapidly have adjusted themselves to those about them. I am not here arguing the removal of all barriers to their incoming, but rather for the overcoming of the most primary evil of our own ignorance-an ignorance that is probably the main obstacle to the world's civilizing. National Conference of Charities and Correction. Is Immigration a Menace? C. L. Sulzberger If wild assertion were argument and its reiteration proof, the case against immigration would be definitely closed. On no subject before the American people has there been more loose talk and less information, more general statement and less specific fact. Until quite lately we had to deal only with the generalizations of the professional restrictionists. More recently the unwarranted conclusions of the Immigration Commission have also been brought into play. These conclusions are called unwarranted because they utterly fail to tally with the evidence which has been presented in the forty odd volumes published and to be published, as the result of the commission's investigations. That they do so fail is shown not alone in the summary of the volumes which has been published by the commission but in the book that has been issued by one of its members, Prof. Jeremiah W. Jenks, in conjunction with Mr. W. Jett Lauck, expert in charge of the industrial investigations of that commission. The only accurate generalization made by the restrictionists on the subject of immigration is that the nationality of the immigrants has changed; that whereas in former years the bulk of the immigration came from northern and western Europe, it has latterly been coming from southern and eastern Europe. This is obviously true, but it is not true as is so often asserted, that while the so-called older immigration was desirable the newer is undesirable. By every statistical test that can be applied, the statement utterly fails of corroboration; nor should it be forgotten that at the time that the older immigration, the so-called desirable people, was coming, the immigration restrictionists of those days considered them as undesirable as the new-comers of today are considered by the same class of critics. Nearly a century ago the same arguments were used regarding the bad habits of the immigrants, their tendency to congest the cities, to reduce wages and to depreciate the American standard of living. The report of the Industrial Commission quotes from Nile's Register of 1817: The immigrants should press into the interior. In the present state of the time, we seem too thick on the maritime frontier already. The same document quotes from the second annual report of the managers of the Society for the Prevention of Pauperism in New York City, 1819: As to the emigrants from foreign countries, the managers are compelled to speak of them in the language of astonishment and apprehension. Through this inlet pauperism threatens us with the most overwhelming consequences. An almost innumerable population beyond the ocean is out of employment and this has the effect of increasing the usual want of employ. This country is the resort of vast numbers of those needy and wretched beings. Many of these foreigners have found employment; some may have passed into the interior; but thousands will remain among us. They are frequently found destitute in our streets; they seek employment at our doors; they are found in our almshouses and in our hospitals; they are found at the bar of criminal tribunals, in our Bridewell, our penitentiary, and our state prison, and we lament to say that they are too often led by want, by vice, and by habit to form a phalanx of plunder and depredations, rendering our city more liable to increase of crime and our houses of correction more crowded with convicts and felons. The same report urged the importance of transporting the foreigner into the interior so that "instead of bringing up his children in idleness, temptation and crime, he would see them amalgamated with the general mass of our population, deriving benefits from our school systems, our moral institutions, and our habits of industry." In 1835 it would seem that the doleful predictions made in 1819, had not materialized, and the restrictionists then regarded the earlier immigrants as desirable but the then-incoming foreigners as a menace. In a paper entitled "Imminent Dangers to the Institutions of the United States of America through Foreign Immigration,” etc., published in 1835, the author speaks of the immigration of previous years as compared with that of the day, and says: Now, we are numerous, Then we were few, feeble and scattered. strong and concentrated. Then our accessions of immigration were real accessions of strength from the ranks of the learned and the good, from enlightened mechanic and artisan and intelligent husbandman. Now, immigration is the accession of weakness, from the ignorant and vicious, or the priest-ridden slaves of Ireland and Germany, or the, outcast tenants of the poorhouses and prisons of Europe. In 1845 the delegates of the Native American National Con vention, meeting at Philadelphia on July 4 of that year, published an address in which occurs the following: It is an incontrovertible truth that the civil institutions of the United States of America have been seriously affected and that they now stand in imminent peril from the rapid and enormous increase in the body of residents of foreign birth, imbued with foreign feelings and of an ignorant and immoral character. The almshouses of Europe are emptied upon our coast, and this by our own invitation—not casually, or to a trivial extent-but systematically and upon a constantly increasing scale. All this is about that class of immigrants which we now call desirable, the fact being that, as at one time in our history, only the dead Indian was regarded as a good Indian, so at all times, to the restrictionists, only the immigrant who did not come was regarded as a good immigrant. Century. 74: 474-80. July, 1907 American of the Future. Brander Matthews It is the testimony of most of the intelligent Europeans who have come here to study us in recent years, that we Americans are less insular than our kin across the sea, less set in our ways, more open-minded. Señor Juan Valera, sometime Spanish Minister in Washington, in the preface to his delightful tale of "Pepita Ximenes," declared that the American public reads a great deal, is indulgent, and "differs from the British public— which is eminently exclusive in its tastes-by its cosmopolitan spirit." It may be said that this is one of the variances between the Americans and the British due to the influence exerted by those elements in our population which are not Anglo-Saxon and not even Teutonic. Cecil Rhodes once scornfully commented on the "unctuous rectitude" of the British, and Lowell once declared that "England seems to be the incarnation of the 'Kingdom of this world." Neither of these accusations will lie against us Americans, open as we may be in other respects to the conviction of sin. Perhaps the reason is to be found in the influence of the Celt-of the Huguenot and of the Irish. To this same Celtic softening of Teutonic harshness we may ascribe also the broader development here of that social instinct which is deficient in Great Britain and dominant in France. This social |