who created great excitement in Rumania by distributing glowing circulars about America. One authority stated to the Immigration Commission that two of the leading steamship lines had five or six thousand ticket-agents in Galicia alone, and that there was "a great hunt for emigrants" there. Selling steerage tickets to America is the chief occupation of large numbers of persons in Austria-Hungary, Greece, and Russia, the main sources of undesirable aliens. In 1908 and 1909 the inflow and outflow of steerage-passengers through our ports amounted to about a million and a half a year. Allowing an average outlay of $50 a head, we have a movement furnishing $75,000,000 of annual business to the foreign railway and steamship companies. That a monster of this size grows dragon claws with which to defend itself goes without saying. CHEAP LABOR A RAIN OF MANNA STILL, it is not as cargo that the immigrant yields his biggest dividends. But for him we could not have laid low so many forests, dug up so much mineral, set going so many factories, or built up such an export trade as we have. In most of the basic industries the new immigrants constitute at least half the labor force. Although millions have come in, there is no sign of supersaturation, no progressive growth of lack of employment. Somehow new mines have been opened and new mills started fast enough to swallow them up. Virtually all of them are at work and, what is more, at work in an efficient system under intelligent direction. Janko produces much more than he did at home, consumes more, and, above all, makes more profit for his employer than the American he displaces. Thanks to him, we have bigger outputs, tonnages, tradebalances, fortunes, tips, and alimonies; also bigger slums, red-light districts, breweries, hospitals, and death-rates. To the employer of unskilled labor this flow of aliens, many of them used to dirt floors, a vegetable diet, and child labor, and ignorant of underclothing, newspapers, and trade unions, is like a rain of For, as regards foreign competitors, his own position is a Gibraltar. When the European sends his capital hither, he puts it into railroad securities yielding from four to seven per cent., thereby releasing American capital for investment in the enterprises that pay from ten to thirty per cent. The foreign capitalist dares not put up mill or refinery here, because he cannot well run such concerns at long range. He may not invade the American market with the products of his mill over there, because our tariff has been designed to prevent. ENDLESS INFLOW OF THE NEEDIEST THUS, so long as he stays in his home market, the American mill-owner is shielded from foreign competition, while the common labor he requires is cheapened for him by the endless inflow of the neediest meekest laborers to be found within the white race. If in time they become ambitious and demanding, there are plenty of "greenies" he can use to teach them a lesson. The "Hunkies" pay their "bit" to the foreman for the job, are driven through the twelve-hour day, and in time are scrapped with as little concern as one throws away a thread-worn bolt. One steel-mill superintendent received official notice to hire no men over thirty-five and keep no man over fortyfive. A plate-mill which had experienced no technical improvement in ten years doubled its production per man by driving the workers. No wonder, then, that in the forty years the American capitalist has had Aladdin's lamp to rub, his profits from mill and steel works, from packinghouse and glass factory, have created a sensational "prosperity," of which a constantly diminishing part leaks down to the wage-earners. Nevertheless, 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"! THE NEW IMMIGRATION AND THE HIGH COST OF LIVING BETWEEN 1900 and 1910, although population grew twenty-one per cent., the output of the ten principal crops of the country increased only nine per cent. Between 1899 and 1911 the value of an average acre's output of such crops increased seventy per cent., while its power to purchase the things the farmer buys was greater by forty-two per cent. There has been a general upheaval of prices, to be sure, but 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. As long as good land lasted, our Government stimulated agriculture by presenting a quarter-section to whoever would undertake to farm wild land. This bounty overdid farming, until, in the middle of the nineties, the cost of living had reached a minimum. With the ending of free land, the upward turn was bound to come, but the change was made more dramatic by the inpouring of ten millions of immigrants without the knowledge, the means, or the inclination to engage in farming. Among us there is one American white farmer for fourteen American whites, one Scandinavian farmer for eight Scandinavians, one German farmer for eleven Germans, one Irish farmer for forty Irish; but it takes 130 Poles, Hungarians, or Italians in this country to furnish one farmer. Failing to contribute their due quota to the production of food, these late-comers have ruptured the equilibrium between field and mill, and made the high cost of living a burning question. Just as the homestead policy overstimulated the growth of farms, the new immigration has overstimulated the growth of factories. IMMIGRANTS AND AGRICULTURE NEVERTHELESS, certain of the South Europeans who are upon the soil have something to show American farmers facing the problems of intensive agriculture. Italians are teaching their neighbors how to extract three crops a year from a soil already nourishing orchard or vineyard. The Portuguese raise vegetables in their walnut groves, grow currants between the rows of trees in the orchard, and beans between the currant rows. They know how to prevent the splitting of their laden fruit-trees by inducing a living brace to grow between opposite branches. The black-beetle problem they solve by planting tomato slips inclosed in paper. From the slopes looking out on the Adriatic the Dalmatian brings a horticultural cunning which the American fruit-grower should be eager to acquire. into berry farms, vineyards, and pepper fields, the reclamation of muck soil in western New York, which Americans were not willing to touch, the transmutation of wild Ozark lands into apples and peaches, are Italian exploits which constitute clear gain for the country. But there are other immigrant farmers whose labors count on the wrong side of the national ledger. Not a few Slav colonies are clearing and tilling land so poor or so steep that it ought never to have been brought under the plow. The soil they have deforested will presently wash into the rivers, leaving stripped rocky slopes to grin, like a Death's-head, in the landscape. The nation will have to pay for it, just as France paid for the reckless ax work that went on under the First Republic. INDUSTRIAL DISPLACEMENT THE facts assembled by the Immigration Commission shatter the rosy theory that foreign labor is drawn into an industry only when native labor is not to be had. The Slavs and Magyars were introduced into Pennsylvania forty-odd years ago by mine-operators looking for more tractable miners. Agents were sent abroad to gather up labor, and frequently foreigners were brought in when a strike was on. The first instance seems to have occurred at Drifton in 1870, and resulted in the importation of two ship-loads of Hungarians. The process of replacing the too-demanding American, Welsh, and Irish. miners with labor from Austria-Hungary went on so rapidly that by the middle of the nineties the change was accomplished. In 1904, during a strike in the coal-fields near Birmingham, Alabama, many southern Europeans were brought in. In 1908 "the larger companies imported a number of immigrants," so that the strike was broken and unionism destroyed in that region. In 1880, in the first strike in the coal-mines of Kansas, "the first immigrants from Italy were brought into the fields as strike-breakers." Poles were introduced into South Cleveland in 1882 to replace strikers in the wire-mills. The meat-packing strike of 1904 in Chicago was broken with trainloads of negroes, Italians, and Greeks. In 1883 the largest oil-refining company at Bayonne, New Jersey, "in order to The conversion of New Jersey barrens break the strike among the Irish and American coopers, introduced great numbers of Slovaks, Ruthenians, and Poles." In 1887 a coal-dockers' strike was broken with Magyars, and in 1904 striking boiler-makers were replaced by Poles. The striking glass-workers in 1904 were beaten by the introduction of Slovaks, Italians, Poles, and Magyars. During the 1907 strike in the iron-mines of northern Minnesota, "one of the larger companies imported large numbers of Montenegrins and other Southeastern races as strikebreakers, while a few of the smaller companies brought into the region a number of German-Austrians." "One mining company imported as many as 1300 of these strike-breakers." The hejira of the English-speaking softcoal miners shows what must happen when low-standard men undercut high-standard men. The miners of Pennsylvania and West Virginia, finding their unions wrecked and their lot growing worse under the floods of men from southern and eastern Europe, migrated in great numbers to the Middle West and the Southwest. But of late the coal-fields of the Middle West have been invaded by multitudes of Italians, Croatians, Poles, and Lithuanians, so that even here American and Americanized miners have their backs to the wall. As for the displaced tradeunionists who sought asylum in the mines of Oklahoma and Kansas, the pouring in of raw immigrants has weakened their bargaining power, and many have gone on to make a last stand in the mines of New Mexico and Colorado. Each exodus left behind an inert element which accepted the harder conditions that came in with the immigrants, and a strong element that rose to better posts in the mines or in other occupations. As for, the displaced, the Iliad of their woes has never been sung-the loss of homes, the shattering of hopes, the untimely setting to work of children, the struggle for a new foothold, and the turning of thousands of self-respecting men into day laborers, odd-job men, down-and-out-ers, and "hoboes." IMMIGRANTS AND LABOR ORGANIZATIONS THE dramatic unionization of the garment industries in our large cities has misled the public as to the actual effect of recent immigration upon trade-unions. The fact is that the immigrants from the backward parts of Europe tend to weaken, if not to shatter, labor organizations in the fields they enter. They arrive needy and eager to get any work at almost any pay. Having had no industrial experience in the old country, they lack the trade-union idea. Without our speech, and often illiterate, they are very hard to reach and to bring into line. So far as they are transients, who are not staking their future on the industry, they are loath to pay union dues and to run the risk of having to strike. It is true that the labor organizer evangelizes the alien workers with his union gospel; but by the time one batch has been welded into a fighting force, another batch is on his hands. His work, like Penelope's web, is raveled out about. as fast as it is woven. No wonder that in the cotton industry unionism has been wrecked, while, of the iron miners, less than two per cent. belong to unions. In 1901 the United States Steel Corporation's constituent companies signed agreements with two thirds of their 125,000 workmen, among whom the English-speaking held a dominant place. Ten years later the company signed not a single agreement with its beaten mass of SlavLatins. There was no union with which to sign, The organizing, organizable Americans have been deleted from the works. No wonder that organized labor demands restriction of immigration. While the inrush continues, the lines of labor will be weak, forming, breaking, and reforming in the face of the intrenchments of capital. IMMIGRANTS AND WAGES DURING the last fifteen years the flood of gold has brought in a spring-tide of prices. Since 1896 the retail cost to Americans of their fifteen principal articles of food has risen seventy per cent. Wages should have risen in like degree if the workman is to maintain his old standard, to say nothing of keeping his place in a social procession which is continually mounting to higher economic levels. We know that by 1907 wages had risen twenty-eight per cent., while retail prices were rising twenty-six per cent. Evidently the working-man was falling behind in the social procession. In the soft-coal-field of Pennsylvania, where the Slav dominates, the coal-worker re ceives forty-two cents a day less than the coal-worker in the mines of the Middle West and Southwest, where he does not dominate. In meat-packing, iron and steel, cotton manufacture, and other foreignized industries the inertia of wages has been very marked. The presence of the immigrant has prevented a wage advance which otherwise must have occurred. What a college man saw in a coppermine in the Southwest gives in a nutshell the logic of low wages. The American miners, getting $2.75 a day, are abruptly displaced without a strike by a train-load of five hundred raw Italians brought in by the company and put to work at from $1.50 to $2 a day. For the Americans there is nothing to do but to "go down the road." At first the Italians live on bread and beer, never wash, wear the same filthy clothes night and day, and are despised. After two or three years they want to live better, wear decent clothes, and be respected. They ask for more wages, the bosses bring in another train-load from the steerage, and the partly Americanized Italians follow the American miners "down the road." IMMIGRANTS AND CONDITIONS OF WORK "THE best we get in the mill now is greenhorns," said the superintendent of a tube mill. "When they first come, they put their heart into it and give a full day's work. But after a while they begin to shirk and do as little as they dare." It is during this early innocence that the immigrant accepts conditions he ought to spurn. This same mill had to break up the practice of selling jobs by foremen. In one concern the boss who sold a job would dismiss the man after a fortnight and sell the job again, while another boss in the same works would take on the dismissed man for a fee. On the Great Northern Railroad the bosses mulcted each Greek laborer a dollar a month for "interpreter." The "bird of passage,' who comes here to get ahead rather than to live, not only accepts the seven-day week and the twelve-hour day, but often demands them. Big earnings blind him to the physiological cost of overwork. It is the American or the half-Americanized foreigner who rebels against the eightyfour-hour schedule. When capital plays lord of the manor, the Old World furnishes the serfs. In some coal districts of West Virginia the land, streets, paths, roads, the miners' cabins, the store, the school, and the church are all owned and controlled by the coal company. The company pays the teacher, and no priest or clergyman objectionable to it may remain on its domain. One may not step off the railroad's right of way, pass through the streets, visit mine or cabin, without permission. There is no place where miners meeting to discuss their grievances may not be dispersed as trespassers. Any miner who talks against his boss or complains of conditions is promptly dismissed, and ejected from the 35,000 acres of company land. Hired sluggers, known as the "wrecking-gang," beat up or even murder the organizer who tries to reach the miners. No saloon, gambling-hall, or bawdy-house is tolerated. on company land. Even the beer wagon may not deliver beer at houses to which the superintendent objects. It is needless to add that the miners are all negroes or foreigners. IS THE FOREIGNER INDISPENSABLE? AFTER an industry has been foreignized, the notion becomes fixed in the minds of the bosses that without the immigrants the industry would come to a standstill. "If it was n't for the Slavs," say the superintendents of the Mesaba Mines, "we could n't get out this ore at all, and Pittsburgh would be smokeless. You can't get an American to work here unless he runs a locomotive or a steam-shovel. We 've tried it; brought 'em in, carloads at a time, and they left." "Would n't they stay for three dollars a day," I suggested, "even if two dollars. and ten cents is n't enough?" "No, it's not a matter of pay. Somehow Americans nowadays are n't any good for hard or dirty work." Hard work! And I think of Americans I have seen in that last asylum of the native born, the far West, slaving with ax and hook, hewing logs for a cabin, ripping out boulders for a road, digging irrigation-ditches, drilling the granite, or timbering the drift-Americans shying at open-pit, steam-shovel mining! The secret is that with the insweep of the unintelligible bunk-house foreigner there grows up a driving and cursing of |