TOPICS OF THE TIME A GREAT NATIONAL PROBLEM VERY line of Professor Ross's paper sequences of the kind of immigration America is now principally getting should be read by every thinking man and woman. The old arguments for unrestricted immigration are not longer applicable, for American conditions and the character of immigration have altogether changed. It is as wise to go on as we have been going as it would be to continue midsummer clothing through February. That for many years a new and developing country prospered nobly under a rising tide of sturdy, industrious, brainy immigration is no reason why that same country, now replete and slowing, should glut its industries and poison its rich life-blood with an overwhelming influx from the inert, unintelligent, and unassimilative peoples of Southern Europe and the west of Asia. Here are a few striking paragraphs in a statement of great convincing power: "When capital plays lord of the manor, the Old World furnishes the serfs." "Just as the homestead policy overstimulated the growth of farms, the new immigration has overstimulated the growth of factories." "The system which allows the manufacturer to buy at a semi-European wage much of the labor that he converts into goods to sell at an American price has been maintained as 'the protection of American labor.'" "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' ... and drop them without compunction?" "The price of farm produce has risen much faster and farther than the price of other commodities. This is 'the high cost of living,' and it is immigration that has made this imp shoot up faster in the United States than anywhere else." "With the insweep of the unintelligent bunk-house foreigner, there grows up a driving and a cursing of labor that 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." "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." "It is nearly a generation since the stress, registered in the labor-market, 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 labor-market by cheaper human beings raises the pressuregage, 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 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.” There is no other so ably equipped to study this subject impartially and to present it in true perspective to American citizens. Professor Ross, during his seven years in the chair of sociology at the University of Wisconsin, has made a worldwide reputation. Before that he was connected with the University of Indiana, Cornell, Leland Stanford, and the University of Nebraska, and has been special lecturer at Harvard and the University of Chicago. He is the author of seven books on sociological subjects, several of which are text-books in wide use. He has traveled in search of first-hand information. His analysis, in this and succeeding papers, of the voluminous and complicated reports of the Immigration Commission, place the results of this vast work within the grasp and the use of busy Americans. There are few subjects so deserving immediate and careful attention. THE TIDAL WAVE OF INDECENCY several years, and which now, let us sin- several years, watch with amused comprehension their disorderly scuttling back into the safety of convention. As for the heralded eccentricity of modern dress, that carries its own cure. At worst it is a safetyvalve; and one may trust in all conditions the collective taste of American women. Again, let not our judgments be impaired by the prominence and large circulation of several of these periodicals. After all, they are as one to thousands of those which, like THE CENTURY, will realize in their pages only the restrained freedom honester and more enlightened times. IN SCHEDULE K AGAIN National Association of Wool Manufacturers" commented on Mr. N. I. Stone's article on "Schedule K," published in the May issue. To this Mr. Stone rejoins: the July CENTURY the secretary of the "The census figures quoted by Mr. Marvin, do not give an adequate idea of the proportion of the industry controlled by the American Woolen Company. utter annihilation of wickedness, nor any other of the horrible phenomena suggested by short-sighted and frightened persons. Shocking though some of its latest manifestations are, it is really nothing to be seriously alarmed about-any more than seasickness or any other abnormal accompaniment of change. Civilization is crossing seas, just now, and the ship is rocking most unpleasantly between moorings. We have cast off most happily the grim and fettering old convention of unnatural silence about natural facts, and we have not yet laid firm hold upon the new and natural and decently frank and altogether liv-ings, knit goods, plush, and upholstery goods, able convention which will be established when civilization determines the kind and extent of the reserves necessary to make living sensitive and high-minded and noble under the conditions of our new intellectual honesty, our increased knowledge, and our finer cultivation. Meantime, without compass or steerage way, we roll a little in the trough. It is history for the thousandth time repeated. Therefore let us not waste emotion bewailing a temporary condition. Let us take our dose as calmly as possible. Let us see in the license of some of our plays a feeling about for limits and let us enjoy the spectacle of the inevitable utter discomfiture of those who pass them. Let us recognize in the self-degradation of a few conspicuous periodicals an attempt to exploit for profit an assumed moral rottenness in a generation which, its curiosity once sated, is already beginning to prove itself sound; and let us, during the next "A comparison of the worsted machinery owned by the American Woolen Company and the rest of the industry shows that in 1909 the American Woolen Company owned 443 worsted combs out of a total of 1978, or about twenty-two and a half per cent. If the combs used in the manufacture of lin in which the American Woolen Company is not engaged, be deducted from the total, Mr. Dale, editor of the "Textile World Record,' estimates that the American Woolen Company would be found to control not far from thirty per cent. of the worsted goods competing with its own products. "My statement to which Mr. Marvin objects did not imply that the American Woolen Company owned sixty per cent. of the capital of the industry, since control can just as effectively be attained by community of stock ownership in different concerns by the same persons. I based my statement on the figures given on page 236 of Mr. Moody's well-known work, 'The Truth about the Trusts.' The estimate of this authority is close to that of Mr. Dale, who estimates that half the worsted industry is represented by about a dozen allied corporations. "I agree with Mr. Marvin that a duty from 132 to 260 per cent. is not always added to the price of the domestic cloth, a fact to which I alluded (p. 112 of the May CENTURY) in referring to the difference in price of cloths in this country and England." THE HE most overrated summer sport in I speak on this subject with some feeling, as, in August last, I tested it on a week-end visit with my friend Jones at his little mosquito ranch in the White Mountains. I can now understand why sleeping under a roof, in a real bed, is insufferable to a man who has been camping all summer: what he misses is the keen excitement, the constant entertainment, the suspense, of a night in the woods. As soon as he lies down in a real bed he becomes so utterly bored that he promptly falls asleep, only to wake up in the morning and find that he has missed the whole night. The moment I arrived at Jones's camp on Saturday afternoon I realized that he was the victim of the outdoor-sleeping fad. He was so under its spell that he immediately took me out to show me my cot. It was a frail, anemic, canvas thing that screamed and creaked protests whenever it was moved or sat upon. It stood on a roofless sleeping-porch. Over it was the branch of a tender tree and over that was the open sky. "Here," said Jones, expansively, "is where you 're to sleep. This region is the most wonderful place for sleeping in all the world. I get actually to look forward to the nights; I tumble in eagerly at ten o'clock, and don't know another thing till morning." "You never know very much," I meditated inwardly, picking a yellow caterpillar off my cot. "How about blankets and things?" It took a vast amount of imagination to think of blankets, for the thermometer showed several degrees of fever. "Oh, I'll give you all you want, and lots of mosquito-netting, too," Jones said. "You can make your bed just as you like; that 's half the fun of the thing." "Ah, yes." Way down in my heart I had a foreboding that it would be rather more than half the fun. "Wonderful!" I simulated. "I have n't slept outdoors for years." 1 "Good!" said Jones. Through the long evening I kept a stout heart and a cheery face; I even joked callously about the coming night, just as men sometimes joke about death and insanity 1 Strictly true, though I had spent several nights outdoors. LXXXVII-20 153 |