workmen and older immigrants have been raised to the plane of an aristocracy of labor.

Yet, while the number of native American workmen in all industries has increased, it is true that in some occupations there has been an actual decrease of the number of English, Welsh, Irish, and German workers, which has been construed as "displacement" of Americanized workers by immigrants from southern and eastern Europe with a lower standard of living. This interpretation overlooks the fact that native workers of native parentage, presumably with as high a standard of living as the Irish, are found in the same occupations in larger numbers than formerly. Another fact that contradicts the popular view is the increase of the number of Scotch immigrants in those very occupations which show a decline in the number of English and Irish. Judged by any standard, the Scotch are not inferior to other immigrants from the United Kingdom. The increased employment of the Scotch in the principal occupations, including even common laborers, warrants the conclusion that the decline in the numbers of English and Irish must have been due to other causes than the competition of recent immigrants with lower standards of living. A further fact that must be considered in this connection is that the English, Welsh, and Irish farmers exhibit a greater decrease, both absolute and relative, than any other occupational group among the same nationalities. Evidently no new farmers came to fill the places of their countrymen who were carried off by death, although the aliens from southern and eastern Europe kept away from the farming sections and left the field open for English, Welsh, and Irish immigrants.

The real explanation of the decrease in the number of immigrants from northern and western Europe in the occupations which rank lowest in the social scale is that the earlier immigrants have worked their way upward. Among the breadwinners born in northern and western Europe, farmers, business men, professional men, and skilled mechanics outnumber those who are employed in the coarser grades of labor. The latter have been left to immigrants from southern and eastern Europe.

But it is argued that the newly arrived immigrant must have work at once and is therefore glad to accept any terms. The Immigration Commission after a study of the earnings of more than half a million employees in mines and manufactures, has

discovered no evidence that immigrants have been hired for less than the prevailing rates of wages.

The primary cause which has determined the movement of wages in the United States during the past thirty years has been the introduction of labor-saving machinery. The effect of the substitution of mechanical devices for human skill is the displacement of the skilled mechanic by the unskilled laborer. This tendency has been counteracted in the United States by the expansion of industry: while the ratio of skilled mechanics to the total operating force was decreasing, the increasing scale of operations prevented an actual reduction in numbers. Of course this adjustment did not proceed without friction. While, in the long run, there has been no displacement of skilled mechanics by unskilled laborers in the industrial field as a whole, yet at certain times and places individual skilled mechanics were doubtless dispensed with and had to seek new employment. The unskilled laborers who replaced them were naturally engaged at lower wages. The fact that most of these unskilled laborers were immigrants disguised the substance of the change—the substitution of unskilled for skilled labor-and made it appear as the displacement of highly-paid native by cheap immigrant labor.

To prove that immigration has virtually lowered the rates of wages, would require a comparative study of wages paid for the same class of labor in various occupations before and after the great influx of immigration. This, however, has never been attempted by the advocates of restriction. In fact, the chaotic state of our wage statistics precludes any but a fragmentary comparison for different periods. In a general way, however, all available data for the period of "the old immigration" agree in that the wages of unskilled laborers, and even of some of the skilled mechanics, did not fully provide for the support of the wage-earner and his family in accordance with their usual standards of living. The shortage had to be made up by the labor of the wife and children.

If the tendency of the new immigration were to lower the rate of wages or to retard the advance of wages, it should be expected that wages would be lower in great cities where the recent immigrants are concentrated, than in rural districts where the population is mostly of native birth. All wage statistics, concur, however, in the opposite conclusion. Since the United States has become a manufacturing country average earnings per

worker have been higher in the cities than in the country. The same difference exists within the same trades between the large and the small cities. Country competition of native Americans often acts as a depressing factor upon the wages of recent immigrants. This fact has been demonstrated in the clothing industry, in the cotton mills, in the coal mines, etc.

Furthermore, if immigration tends to depress wages, this tendency must manifest itself in lower average earnings in states with a large immigrant population than in states with a predominant native population. No such tendency, however, is discernible from wage statistics. As a rule, annual earnings are higher in states with a higher percentage of foreign-born workers.

The conditions in some of the leading industries employing large numbers of recent immigrants point to the same conclusions. In the Pittsburgh steel mills the rates of wages of various grades of employees have varied directly with the proportion of recent immigrants. The wages of the aristocrats of labor, none of whom are southern or eastern Europeans, have been reduced in some cases as much as 40 per cent; the money wages of the skilled and semi-skilled workers, two-thirds of whom are natives or old immigrants, have not advanced notwithstanding the increased cost of living, while the wages of the unskilled laborers, the bulk of whom are immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, have been going up.

Another typical immigrant industry is the manufacture of clothing. The clothing industry has become associated in the public mind with the sweating system, and since the employees are, with few exceptions, immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, the conclusion is readily reached that the root of the sweating system is in the character of the new immigration. Yet the origin of the sweating system preceded the Jewish clothing workers by more than half a century. Throughout the second quarter of the past century native American and Irish women worked in the sweat shops of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia for only board and lodging, or even for board alone, depending upon their families for other necessities, whereas the Jewish factory girls of the present day are at least selfsupporting.

In the cotton mills of New England the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when the operatives were practically all of

the English-speaking races, was a period of intermittent advances and reductions in wages; on the whole, wages remained stationary. The first years of the present century, up to the crisis of 1908, were marked by the advent of the southern and eastern Europeans into the cotton mills, and by an uninterrupted upward movement of wages. The competition of the cheap American labor of the Southern cotton mills, however, tends to keep down the wages of the southern and eastern European, Armenian, and Syrian immigrants employed in the New England mills.

As a general rule, the employment of large numbers of recent immigrants has gone together with substantial advances in wages. This correlation between the movements of wages and immigration is not the manifestation of some mysterious racial trait, but the plain working of the law of supply and demand. The employment of a high percentage of immigrants in any section, industry, or occupation, is an indication of an active demand for labor in excess of the native supply. Absence of immigrants is a sign of a dull labor market.

National Conference for Good City Government.

109: 142-7

Effect of Immigration on Municipal Politics. William S. Bennet

Properly, I presume, the subject of this paper ought to be the narrower one "the effect of recent immigration on elections in large cities," as I intend confining myself as strictly as the subject permits, to that field.

The effort to measure the effect of a particular class on so complex a question as that of the usual election in a large city, largely and naturally fails, through the fact that a class, large enough in itself to definitely influence an election result, is itself subject to so many differing exterior and contending influences that it is practically impossible ever to say didactically: this thing these particular people of themselves did because of themselves. I think we are beginning, too, to realize more and more the futility of attempting to say of any foreign people among us, that as a class they are wholly bad or wholly worthy, but to incline to judge them not as of a particular race or people, but as individuals, each with a separate responsibility. Nevertheless, there are two great elementary questions as to recent immigrants that persist, that are legitimate, and that to an appreciable extent can be answered:;

First-How is our country preparing its city election machinery in relation to the present immigration? and

Second-How are our more recent immigrants adapting themselves to and availing themselves of our election situations as they find them?

The first is rarely asked, but is more important. Those who have read Mr. Steiner's description of the gang of newly-arrived aliens led to illegally to vote by the working boss, recall his simple and vivid delineation of the contempt of our institutions instilled by that wrongful act. Much of our trouble in the past has sprung from the belief amongst newly-made citizens, justified by far too much evidence, that we ourselves have regarded elections as contentions to be decided not at all by argument, persuasion or reason, but by trickery, treachery, bribery, perjury, assault, forgery, deceit and even murder. It is not difficult to recall how recently the ordinary election was accompanied invariably by drunkenness and usually by riot; the partisan boards, in New York state at least; the polling places, practically in places where liquor was sold and the open, shameless buying and selling of votes. The new and impressionable citizen of even but twenty years ago had held out to him at election inducements to all that was worst in his character. If he held our elections and institutions lightly, we had ourselves to blame for it. Along the lines of better elections we have improved immensely. In our great city the election boards are bi-partisan. The secret ballot has made the buying of votes precarious merchandising; no polling place is now in a drinking place; public sentiment frowns on election-law violation; the average citizen resents electioneering, particularly on election day and near the polls; the workers therefore are fewer, there is rarely disorder and the day is relatively as peaceful as a Sunday. This is as it should be, the responsibilty of the election, great on every individual, should be exercised amid surroundings which are at least respectable, serious and dignified.

The second question is partly answered by the answer to the first. Man moves much along lines of the least resistance, and the stranger adapts himself to conditions as he finds them. Make your elections riotous and corrupt and your new-made, foreignborn citizen riots and sells his vote with the native born; make the election day what it should be, the rigidly guarded place of the legal and formal expression of opinions formed on delibera