labor which no self-respecting American. will endure. Nor can he bear to be despised as the foreigner is. It is not the work or the pay that he minds, but the stigma. This is why, when a labor force has come to be mostly Slav, it will soon be all Slav. But if the supply of raw Slavs were cut off, the standards and status of the laborers would rise, and the Americans would come into the industry.

Some bosses argue for a continuous supply of green foreigners because the sons of the immigrants are "above their fathers' jobs." A strange industry this! Britain's iron industry is manned by Britons, Germany's by Germans, but we are to believe that America's iron industry is an exotic which can attract neither native Americans nor the sons of immigrants. The truth is that the school and other civilizing agencies have turned Michael's boy not against hard work, but against the contempt with which his father's kind of work is tainted. But for the endless stream of transients, with their pigsty mode of life, their brawls and their animal pleasures, the stigma on the work would vanish, and the son of the immigrant would be willing to inherit his father's job.

IMMIGRANT WOMEN DOING MEN'S WORK WHILE millions of women are being drawn from the home into industry, the popular ideal of womanhood serves as a precious safeguard, turning them away from coarsening occupations which might rob them of health or youth or refinement. But this ideal, which is higher among the American working-men than among the workers of any other people, is menaced by the new immigrants, with their peasant notions of womanhood. The Slavs and the Italians are not in the least queasy about putting their women into heavy and dirty work, such as core-making, glassgrinding, and hide-scraping, which selfrespecting American girls will not touch. The employer realizes this, and continually tries these women in male occupations, with the object of substituting them for men, beating down men's wages or breaking a men's strike. Engaging in such masculine work not only prevents immigrant women from rising to the American woman's sense of self-respect, but it hinders their men from developing the American man's spirit of chivalry. What is

more, the extension of woman's sphere on the wrong side undermines the native standard of womanliness, so that native girls are perhaps being drawn into work that denies them refinement and romance.

WHAT BECOMES OF DISPLACED AMERICANS

DOES the man the immigrant displaces rise or sink? The theory that the immigrant pushes him up is not without some color or truth. In Cleveland the American, German, and Bohemian iron-mill workers displaced within the last fifteen years seem to have been reabsorbed into other growing industries. They are engineers and firemen, bricklayers, carpenters, slaters, structural iron-workers, steam-fitters, plumbers, and printers. Leaving pick and wheelbarrow to Italian and Slav, the Irish are now meter-readers, wire-stringers, conductors, motor-men, porters, janitors, caretakers, night-watchmen, and elevatormen. I find no sign that either the displaced workman or his sons have suffered from the advent of Pole and Magyar. Some may have migrated, but certainly those left have easier work and better pay. It is as though the alien tide had passed beneath them and lifted them up. On the other hand, in Pittsburgh and vicinity the new immigration has been like a flood sweeping away the jobs, homes, and standards of great numbers, and obliging them to save themselves by accepting poorer occupations or fleeing to the West. The cause of the difference is that Pittsburgh held to the basic industries, while in Cleveland numerous high-grade manufactures started up which absorbed the displaced workmen into the upper part of their labor force.

OUR STANDARD OF LIVING CRUMBLES UNLESS there is some such collateral growth of skill-demanding industries, the new immigrants bring disaster to many of the working-men they undercut. The expansion of the industry will create some good jobs, but not enough to reabsorb the Americans displaced. Thus in the ironore-mines of Minnesota, out of seventyfive men kept busy by one steam-shovel, only thirteen get $2.50 a day or more, and $2.50 is the least that will maintain a family on the American standard. It is plain that the advent of sixty-two cheap immigrants might displace sixty-two Americans or Irish, while it would create

only thirteen decent-wage jobs for them. Scarcely any industry can grow fast enough to reabsorb into skilled or semiskilled positions the displaced workmen.

Employers observe a tendency for employment to become more fluctuating and seasonal because of access to an elastic supply of aliens, without family or local attachments, ready to go anywhere or do anything. In certain centers, immigrant laborers form, as it were, visible living pools from which the employer can dip as he needs. Why should he smooth out his work evenly through the year in order to keep a labor force composed of family men with local roots when he can always take on "ginnies" without trouble and drop them without compunction? Railroad shops are coming to hire and to "fire" men as they need them instead of relying on the experienced regular employees. In a concern with 30,000 employees, the rate of change is a hundred per cent. a year, and is increasing. Labor leaders notice that employment is becoming more fluctuating, there are fewer steady jobs, and the proportion of men who are justified in founding a home constantly diminishes.

THE RISE OF SOCIAL PRESSURE

FREE land, coupled with high individual efficiency, has made this country a lowpressure area. It ought to remain such, because individualistic democracy forbids a blind animal-like increase of numbers. By causing the population to accommodate itself to opportunities, our democracy solves the Sphinx's riddle and opens a bright prospect of continuous social prog

ress.

But of late that prospect has been clouded. The streaming in from the backward lands is sensibly converting this country from a low-pressure to a highpressure area. It is nearly a generation since the stress, registered in the labormarket, caused the British working-man to fight shy of America. It is twenty years since it reached the point at which the German working-man ceased to hope to better himself much by migrating to America. As the saturation of our labormarket by cheaper and ever cheaper human beings raises the pressure-gage, we cease to attract as of yore such peoples as the North Italians and the Magyars.

In 1898 few came to us from east of In the December CENTURY Professor Ross will write

Hungary. Now we are receiving them from Asiatic Turkey, Circassia, Syria, and Arabia. An immigration has started up from Persia, and conditions are ripe for a heavy influx from western Asia. These remote regions, which have had only twilight from Europe's forenoon, are highpressure areas. Their people are too many in relation to the opportunities they know how to use. Until education, democratic ideas, and the elevation of women restrict their increase, or machine industry widens their opportunities, these regions will continue to produce a surplus of people.

If an air-chamber be successively connected by pipes with a large number of tanks of compressed air, the pressure within the chamber must rise. Similarly, if a low-pressure society be connected by cheap steam-transportation with several high-pressure societies, and allows them freely to discharge into it their surplus population, the pressure in that society must rise. But for Chinese exclusion we should by this time have six or eight million Celestials in the far West, and mud villages and bamboo huts would fill the noble valleys of California. Something like this must occur as we go on draining away surplus people from larger and larger areas of high pressure.

Immigration raises the pressure-gage at once for laborers, but only gradually for other classes. It is the children of the immigrants who communicate the pressure to all social levels. The investor, landowner, or contractor profits by the coming in of bare-handed men, and can well afford to preach world-wide brotherhood. The professional man, sitting comfortable above the arena of struggle, can nobly rebuke narrowness and race hatred. If the stream of immigration included capitalists with funds, merchants ready to invade all lines of business, lawyers, doctors, engineers, and professors qualified to compete immediately with our professional men, even judges and officials able to lure votes away from our own candidates for office, the pressure would be felt all along the line, and there might be something heroic in standing for the equal right of all races to American opportunities. But since actually the brunt is borne by labor, it is easy for the shielded to indulge in generous views on the subject of immigration. of the effect of present day immigration on the race.