Background Information
Robert Hunter (1874-1942) was prominent in the fields of charity and social work. Hunter is most famous for his 1904 book, Poverty, from which these materials were scanned. Here Hunter, among other matters, described poverty as a result of conditions beyond the individual's control. This part of the book reveals Hunter's views on immigration, which did so much to change the face of American society during his lifetime. They are clearly influenced by Walker's theory. In his "Conclusion" Hunter draws together his analysis for all of the aspects of poverty that he studied.
Read Robert Alston Stevenson, "The Poor in Summer" (1901), for a more sympathetic treatment of the poor in slums.
In the poorest quarters of many great American cities and industrial communities one is struck by a most peculiar fact--the poor are almost entirely foreign born. Great colonies, foreign in language, customs, habits, and institutions, are separated from each other and from the distinctly American groups on national or racial lines. By crossing the Bowery one leaves behind him the great Jewish colony made up of Russians, Poles, and Roumanians and passes into Italy; to the northeast lies a little Germany; to the southwest a colony of Syrians; to the west lies an Irish community, a settlement of negroes, and a remnant of the old native American stock--to the south lie a Chinese and a Greek colony. On Manhattan alone, either on the extreme west side or the extreme east side, there are other colonies of the Irish, the Jews, and the Italians, and, in addition, there is a large colony of Bohemians. In Chicago there are the same foreign poor. To my own knowledge there are four Italian colonies, two Polish, a Bohemian, an Irish, a Jewish, a German, a negro, a Chinese, a Greek, a Scandinavian, and other colonies. So it is also in Boston and many other cities. In New York alone there are more persons of German descent than persons of native descent, and the German element is larger than in any city of Germany except Berlin. There are nearly twice as many Irish as in Dublin, about as many Jews as in Warsaw, and more Italians than in Naples or Venice. No other great nation has a widespread poverty which is foreign to its own native people except in so far as it exists in distant colonies in foreign lands. Our foreign colonies are to an important extent in the cities of our own country. On a small scale we have Russia's poverty, Poland's poverty, Italy's poverty, Hungary's poverty, Bohemia's poverty-and what other nation's have we not ? England, France, Germany, or Italy may speak almost solely of her native poor, her only poor, the poor of her own blood. In those countries the rich and the poor may meet together, talk together, worship together. In addition to all the elemental bonds of union there are many others growing out of national life. In certain large cities of this country almost everything separates "the classes and the masses" except the feeling which inheres in the word "humanity." The rich and well-to-do are mostly Americans; the poor are mostly foreign, drawn from among the miserable of every nation. The citizen and the slave of Greece were scarcely more effectually separated.
To live in one of these foreign communities is actually to live on foreign soil. The thoughts, feelings, and traditions which belong to the mental life of the colony are often entirely alien to an American. The newspapers, the literature, the ideals, the passions, the things which agitate the community, are unknown to us except in fragments. During the meat riots on the east side of New York City two years ago, I could understand nothing, as I stood among the mobs of rioters, except that heads were being broken, windows smashed, and that the people were in a frenzy. A few years ago, when living in Chicago in a colony of Bohemians and Hungarians who had been thrown out of employment by the closing of a great industry, I went about among the groups clustered in the streets or gathered in the halls. I felt the unrest, the denunciation, the growing brutality, but I was unable to discuss with them their grievances, to sympathize with them, or to oppose them. I was an utter stranger in my own city. A fire was started by some one a few buildings were burned. I watched the embittered and angered faces light up with pleasure, but only by such expressions of feeling could I understand what agitated the people of this foreign land. In London, there is an English people in Paris, a French people; in Moscow, a Russian people. In all these countries there are the masters and the workmen; the rich and the poor, separated by wealth, by position, and by place of dwelling. But in the largest cities of America there are many other things which separate the rich and the poor. Language, institutions, customs, and even religion separate the native and the foreigner. It is this separation which makes the problem of poverty in America more difficult of solution than that of any other nation.
The movement of the poor from one nation to another is one of the astonishing phenomena of modern society. The poor of any country find it possible to move from one extreme of the world to another extreme in quest of better economic or social conditions. The French Canadians move backward and forward between this country and Canada. The poor Italian peasantry of Sicily and southern Italy are even able to come in great numbers from their country to work here during the summer, returning home again for the winter season. In 1898 sixty-six thousand Italian emigrants returned to the port of Genoa. The poorest of the Jews of Russia, the most oppressed peasantry of Asiatic countries, are able to come to the United States to be freed from oppression, or in the hope that by so doing their material condition will be bettered. Rapid and cheap transportation has made possible these remarkable migrations. Nothing shows more clearly than this the change which has taken place in the status of the worker; he is no longer slave or serf, fixed to master or soil; he is free to go where he will, but he has far less security of livelihood than formerly; he is propertyless and proletarian. As a result of these migrations of working men and women national barriers have been beaten down, prejudices overcome, and an intermingling of races and nationalities has ensued in the same country, city, or village, which would have been inconceivable fifty years ago.
While there is a great movement of population from all parts of the old world to all parts of the new, the migration to the United States is the largest and the most conspicuous. Literally speaking, millions of foreigners have established colonies in the very hearts of our urban and industrial communities. For reasons of poverty their colonies are usually established in the poorest, the most criminal, the most politically debauched, and the most vicious portions of our cities. These colonies often make up the main portion of our so-called "slums." In Baltimore 77 per cent of the total population of the slums was in the year 1894 of foreign birth or parentage. In Chicago the foreign element was 90 per cent; in New York, 95 per cent; and in Philadelphia, 91 per cent. In recent years the flow of immigrants to the cities, where they are not needed, instead of to those parts of the country where they are needed, has been steadily increasing. Sixty-nine per cent of the present immigration avows itself as determined to settle either in the great cities or in certain communities of the four great industrial states, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, and Illinois. According to their own statements, nearly 60 per cent of the Russian and Polish Jews intend to settle in the largest cities. As a matter of fact, those who actually do settle in cities are even more numerous than this percentage indicates. As the class of immigrants, drawn from eastern and southern Europe, Russia, and Asia, come in increasing numbers to the United States, the tendency to settle in cities likewise increases. For many reasons the centripetal force of the foreign colonies seems irresistible. Already these great foreign cities in our slums have become wildernesses of neglect, almost unexplored and almost unknown to us. Even the settlements touch but few of their vast number. The patron, enslaving industrially the Italians, the politician, seeking selfish ends, the Jew sweater, and the owner, or agent, of insanitary tenements are the ones who teach the immigrant what America is and what it stands for. Each new shipload increases the profits of these classes, adds to the population of the great cities and colonies, and incidentally adds to its misery.
It is amazing to consider the extent of the foreign element in this country. Ireland and Scotland combined had in the year 1889 less than ten million people, and yet there were considerably over that number of foreigners in the United States in the year 1900. There were almost twenty-one millions of our population with both parents foreign born; that is to say, more than the population of Portugal, Sweden, Holland, and Belgium combined in the year 1890. Considerably over six millions of our population, over ten years of age, were illiterate-a population about equal to that of Belgium. Since the year 1821 over twenty million immigrants have arrived in this country. Within the last twenty-three years considerably over half of this number, or upwards of ten million immigrants, have landed in the United States. The figures are really astounding. In many towns nearly one-half of the population is foreign. About 37 per cent of the people of New York City are foreign born, and over 80 per cent are either foreign born or of foreign parentage. In the latter sense about 80 per cent of the population of Chicago is foreign, in Milwaukee nearly 85 per cent, in Fall River about the same per cent. In no less than thirty-three of our largest cities the foreign population is larger than the native. A man prominent in philanthropic work among the Jews claims, as a result of an independent census, that there are over half a million Jews foreign born and of foreign parentage in New York City. According to the United States Census, the immigrants from Germany and Ireland make up the largest numbers; but they are now being fast outstripped by those from eastern Europe. Assistant Commissioner of Immigration McSweeney said a couple of years ago, "A circle ... including the sources of the present immigration to the United States would have its center in Constantinople.'' These facts and figures, even if there were nothing else to be said, would warrant the most serious consideration being given to the subject of immigration.
The problem of a foreign poverty, the growth of great colonies preyed upon by the worst classes, the immense number yearly of newcomers and the fact that the recent immigration brings us fewer Teutons and vastly more southern Europeans, Slavs, and Asiatics, are facts which the serious citizen should care to consider. Only the student of those ethnic changes wrought by great migratory movements, such as the one we witness in our day, can have any idea of the racial modifications which are likely to result from the coming of these strange peoples from all parts of the world. Far-reaching changes in our national characteristics will result. The American type must change in response to these new racial influences. Until 1860 the American was steadily growing in stature. The recent immigration from eastern and southern Europe, however, will, it seems agreed, decrease the average stature of the American. It is said that the skull will become shorter and broader. There will also be psychological changes resulting from the mixture of races. What the final man will be no one can foretell, but the very knowledge of the ethnic changes which must result increases tremendously the responsibility of the American people to this question of immigration. By act of legislation there can be a selection practiced which may result in infinite good to the people. Foreign countries, by reason of oppression, wars, and lack of education, have added greatly to their unfit and abnormal classes. The strong and selected have gone to war to be killed; the weak and mentally deficient have been left at home to increase population. According to the Commissioner of Immigration these very classes of the unfit are at present coming to our shores in vast numbers to exercise their influence in these ethnic changes.9 At the same time the better classes of Italians are going to South America; large numbers of skilled workers from Germany and emigrants from other advanced nations are now going to South America, Australia and elsewhere in preference to America. The Honorable James Bryce, one of the most careful foreign observers of our social and political life, said about ten years ago: "Within the last decade new swarms of European immigrants have invaded America, drawn from their homes in the eastern parts of central Europe by the constant cheapening of ocean transit and by that more thorough drainage, so to speak, of the inland regions of Europe which is due to the extension of railways. These immigrants, largely of Slavonic race, come from a lower stratum of civilization than the German immigrants of the past, and, since they speak foreign tongues, are less quickly amenable to American influences, and probably altogether less improvable than are the Irish. There seems to be a danger that if they continue to come in large numbers they may retain their own low standard of decency and comfort, and menace the continuance among the working class generally of that far higher standard which has hitherto prevailed in all but a few spots in the country." It is not sufficient to answer the manifold questions presented by these problems in the ordinary way of Americans by saying that some of the recent immigrants become rich. Many, it may be as truly said, remain poor. Unrestricted immigration involves more than wealth-getting or poverty. Many of the most subtle, social, and ethnological questions are involved. Here, however, we must speak of immigration in its relation to poverty and therefore mainly in its economic aspects.
A striking fact in connection with the movement of population is the influence of the profit-seeking forces upon its volume. It is stimulated by certain economic forces consciously exercised. Generally speaking, immigration is promoted by two classes: large employers of labor, seeking always and everywhere the cheapest form obtainable, and the owners of the transatlantic steamship companies. The former are responsible for large numbers of contract laborers. Mr. Jacob A. Riis said very recently: "Scarce a Greek comes here, man or boy, who is not under contract. A hundred dollars a year is the price, so it is said by those who know, though the padrone's cunning has put the legal proof beyond their reach. And the Armenian and Syrian hucksters are ' worked ' by some peddling trust that traffics in human labor as do other merchants in foodstuffs and coal and oil." X These foreign people do not come as the early immigrants came, overcoming many obstacles and strong to overcome them for the sake of a new chance in the new world they are seduced into coming, enticed by every available means and by every known scheme of advertising. Bolton King, writing on "Italy To-day," says that in 1896 "there were over seven thousand emigration agents in the country (Italy), and too many of them have speculated on the Peasant's ignorance, giving false in formation as to the labor market, sometimes cheating him (the Italian) of the little hoard he had taken with him, or deliberately sending him to a different locality from that agreed upon." These agencies in Europe are spread " like a vast network," having representatives in every town, village, and hamlet for the purpose of making the ignorant peasantry believe fabulous stories of wealth to be had in America. It is not difficult to deceive the illiterate and, consequently, they, in particular, are coming in larger and larger numbers. In fact, both the type and the nationality of the immigrants who come to America are very largely determined by the activity of these agents and by the ports from which the ships sail. If the steamship companies undertook to increase their business by opening a new port in the Baltic, we should have a great increase of immigrants from any Russian or Polish colony in which their agents worked. It is even said that a steamship company, in consideration of a certain number of yearly immigrants guaranteed by the government, has decided to open a new port in an eastern European country. The people who come do not expect to fight a hard industrial battle after they have arrived; they have been deceived by the foreign agents, trafficked in for profits, and looted by the unscrupulous.
It should be realized that the forces promoting immigration are selfish forces caring neither for the welfare of the country nor for the welfare of the immigrant. Whenever a bill comes before Congress to restrict immigration, every effort is made by these private interests to prevent its passage. A few years ago the following letter was sent out by a general agent of the North German Lloyd Steamship Company to their many agencies in all parts of this country:
"Immigration bill comes up in the House Wednesday. Wire your congressman, our expense, protesting against proposed exclusion and requesting bill be defeated, informing him that vote in favor means defeat next election.
(Signed)
"H. CLAUSSENIUS & CO."
Similar intimidating telegrams were sent to every newspaper in which the steamship companies advertised. Official testimony also shows that bribery, in the form of passes, given to the editors and proprietors of newspapers, has helped to create newspaper opposition to restrictive legislation.
The class of large employers most active in preventing the restriction of immigration have usually been those paying the smallest wages. A representative of the Southern Pacific Railroad, appearing before the Committee of the United States, Senate on Immigration in 1902, for the purpose of opposing restriction, claimed that the railroad was unable to get sufficient workmen. The Commissioner General of Immigration, knowing well the wages and conditions of railway workmen, said, "Let it pay living wages and it will have laborers enough." The wages paid by the Southern Pacific, as shown before the same committee, were from $1.16 to $1.39 a day, or, in other terms, from $350 to $425 a year.] Those employers who use every means, fair or foul, to obtain an over-supply of laborers, and, in this way, to force wages down to the lowest possible limit, should be classed among the dangerous elements of any country. This policy, pursued for many years in the anthracite mining districts of Pennsylvania, caused violent disturbances until the men were organized in unions for the purpose of limiting the supply of laborers and of increasing wages. In order to keep wages down and to prevent the growth of trade unions, many employers advocate unlimited immigration. The reports to the Industrial Commission show that in those districts where there is an over-supply of laborers of many different nationalities, it is almost impossible to organize the workers until suffering makes the men realize the necessity of union, instead of competition, among themselves. In this way the selfish interests create serious social problems by promoting excessive immigration.
Curiously enough the only other class of Americans who are actively supporting a like policy of unlimited immigration are the revolutionary anarchists; the latter working consciously, and the former classes unconsciously, to bring about the same end. According to the anarchist theory, immigration is one of the active sources creating an intense competition for bread, and, in consequence, a greater general poverty. In a miserable, half-lighted hall, I heard a few years ago a discussion of the subject by a group of revolutionary anarchists, mostly, I must say, foreigners. The speaker, a foreigner, using German and at times a broken English, said there was no hope of revolution in this country until conditions got worse. The immigrants were, however, breaking down the standards of living, and in a few years the workers, enraged by hunger and poverty, would rise up with arms and dynamite to destroy their masters and to establish the anarchist state. I have before me an anarchist leaflet called "A Letter to Tramps, the Unemployed, the Disinherited, and the Miserable." After appealing to these classes to realize their wretched condition and the cause of it, namely, the robbers who live in their " voluptuous homes "and" engage themselves at wanton sports," the letter urges a petition which the rich may read by the " red glare bursting from the cannon's mouth." It ends up with this significant phrase, in italics, " Learn the use of explosives." The anarchist knows there is no better school to prepare men for revolution than that of poverty. Anything which will make profits is favored by the steamship companies; anything which creates a greater supply of cheap labor is favored by certain employers anything which makes poverty more general and more stinging is favored by revolutionary anarchists. This last body of men has no selfish interest in the present degradation of labor. Its position is based upon the principle that poverty, if severe enough, will bring a revolution. The other bodies of men have only in view their present selfish interests. Whatever difference there is in motive, the end they all seek is for the present precisely the same.
These are the ones who favor unrestricted immigration. The actual conditions of the workers show, I think, that there is in many places in this country a large supply of labor which our industries are not using-and, in fact, cannot use. The figures of unemployment mentioned in other places show this conclusively; but for further proof any one may visit these colonies at any time and see for himself the great numbers of idle men walking the streets. This enforced idleness, due to inability to find employment, is also shown by the figures gathered by the Department of Labor at Washington, in the investigation of the Italians in Chicago. During the year of the investigation the Italian workman was actually employed on an average but little more than four months out of the twelve. The other eight months were spent in idleness. The average wage of the Italian workman was less than $6 a week, and, in the most unskilled trades, it fell in one class to $5, and in another as low as $4.37. These wages, these long months of unemployment, mean wretched poverty. They mean starvation, insanity, and tuberculosis. Let any one look about in the colonies. The evidences of poverty are everywhere. The local doctor will tell you that there is a great prevalence of rickets among the Italian children, a disease due to malnutrition the settlement worker will tell you that the child is taken from school at the earliest hour and sent to work; the woman is taken from her children and put to work the neglected children are left to the vice and crime taught by the street gang; the policeman will tell you, if you ask, that the Italians of the poorest class obtain their food to a large extent from the garbage boxes. He will also tell you that the fighting and the drunkenness result naturally from unwilling idleness. Mr. Jacob A. Riis, speaking of the Italians who swarm about the city dumps, says, "Whenever the back of the sanitary police is turned, he will make his home in the filthy burrows where he works by day, sleeping and eating his meals under the dump, on the edge of slimy depths and amid surroundings full of unutterable horror." He adds, the city is content to board the Italian 44 so long as he can make the ash-barrels yield the food to keep him alive." It would seem that our industries fail to absorb some few at least of the newcomers.
Since these facts and figures concerning the conditions of poverty in these Italian colonies were made public, several hundred thousand more Italians have immigrated. In the last five years over six hundred thousand Italians have arrived in this country. Last year, 1903, almost three hundred thousand new immigrants were admitted to the Italian colonies of this country, to share with those already here whatever may be rescued from the city's garbage, or to fight with them, or against them, for a chance to work and for means of livelihood. The wages given above do not, however, represent the extent of their poverty. The padrone must get his commissions and profits out of these poverty-stricken people. By organization under a padrone, for the padrone's benefit, the men work for wages, the amount of which they often do not know; but when there is work, they get it, because the sort of slavery which they are willing to suffer and the standard of life which they are willing to accept is most satisfactory to those contractors who desire to get labor at the cheapest possible rates. The padrone is a parasite. He lives and grows rich by fleecing ignorant immigrants from his own country. He helps the steamship companies to stimulate immigration. He gets his commission for bringing tenants to a vile tenement. He farms out laborers to railroad companies and other employers. When they are working, he supplies them with food at excessive prices. It is even said that he is sometimes the owner of the Italians, and that they are actually his slaves.
These conditions of poverty are not peculiar to the Italians. They are only worse with them. Among the Jews, who have been admitted in great numbers to this country, and who have settled almost entirely in the largest cities, distress and poverty are widespread. Not to speak from observation, but to quote only from published reports, there is more than enough to be said. The annual report of the United Hebrew Charities for 1901 says: "A condition of chronic poverty is developing in the Jewish community of New York that is appalling in its immensity. Forty-five per cent of our applicants, representing between twenty thousand and twenty-five thousand human beings, have been in the United States over five years; have been given the opportunities for economic and industrial improvement which this country affords; yet, notwithstanding all this, have not managed to reach a position of economic independence." The same report says, "The statement can safely be made that during the year from seventy-five thousand to one hundred thousand members of the New York Jewish community are unable to supply themselves with the immediate necessaries of life." 1 In the report of the same society for 1898 the following passage occurs, " Those who are familiar with the crowded section on the lower east side know that vices are beginning to spring up which heretofore have been strangers to the Jewish people." 9 In the report for 1901 this observation is confirmed and made more explicit, "The horrible congestion in which so many of our co-religionists live, the squalor and filth, the lack of air and sunlight, the absence, frequently, of even the most common decencies, are too well known to require repetition at this writing."
I do not know whether or not, all considered, the Italians have improved their lot by coming to America. Many of them have, doubtless, bettered themselves financially, but I do know that nothing in Polish Russia can compare with the conditions stated above concerning the Jewish community of New York City. From careful observation in both places, I should say, offhand, that, except for advantages of education, the Jews of the Polish part of the Russian Pale are better off morally, physically, religiously, and perhaps even financially, than those of the east side of New York. It is never safe to make such a statement without searching inquiry, but, so far as my observation goes, it is true.
Distressing as these conditions seem, many people will, doubtless, feel inclined to say that immigrants arriving in poverty would, very naturally, have to suffer some of these conditions for a few years at least. The fact is, however, that the competition of recent immigrants increases the poverty among the native as well as among the more or less Americanized working classes. The poverty of the Irish, and the degeneration which has resulted from it, is an excellent example.
I think any one who has lived in the poorer quarters of any large city or industrial community will agree that the Irish-American has degenerated in recent years in the most astonishing way. Certain districts, formerly flourishing, in which the people were prosperous, thrifty, and energetic, are at present the very worst pauperized and most criminal districts of our cities. For instance, the " Archy Road " section of Chicago, the home of Peter Dunne's " Mr. Dooley," was a few years ago a prosperous district of sober, self-respecting, working people. The Irish were at that time doing almost all the common laboring work of the city, the unloading of barges on the river, the unskilled work in the railroad yards, the street-cleaning work, and other common laboring jobs about the mills and factories. Little by little the padrones began to bargain on political lines with corrupt aldermen, and the Italians were put to work on city jobs. Johnnie Powers, whose district is largely an Italian one, could, at one time, it is said, "make the proud boast that he had two thousand six hundred people in his ward upon the public pay roll.'' The Poles and Hungarians have taken away much of the unskilled work at the mills and at the stock yards the Bohemians have monopolized the wood-working trades. As a result, the Irish have had either to rise to higher positions or to compete successfully with this poorer paid labor. They were unable to do the one and refused to do the other. In consequence, the homes are being mortgaged and lost the young lads are becoming gamblers and drunkards and vagrants. I have recently seen a statement that crime is decreasing in Ireland; but in the larger cities of this country the Irish make up an undue proportion of vagrants, criminals, paupers, and detectives. Over 76 per cent of the paupers of foreign birth in Massachusetts a few years ago were Irish, although they constituted only 46 per cent of the foreign born in that state. I do not believe that there are any qualities inherent in the Irish to which may be attributed the cause for this degeneration. It seems difficult to explain it except on the ground of excessive competition among the workers. In the rural communities, where the competition of recent immigrants has not been felt, the Irish, on the whole, have developed into very excellent Americans. Nothing would be of greater value to one interested in the effects of immigration than a study showing the degeneration which results from this battle between the wage-earners of different nationalities, in the cities and in the industrial communities, for the means of livelihood.
This general poverty which exists among the immigrants brings us very naturally to the consideration of the actual burden which immigration places upon the state. This burden is principally borne by the benevolent, charitable, and penal institutions. The thing which most strikes one in a visit to the public institutions of the state is the great number of foreigners of all nationalities which one finds there. The only figures which exist of pauperism, in the United States as a whole, are those gathered by the Census Bureau. They are by no means complete; the number of the poor supported in their homes is unknown. Nevertheless, the burden of the dependent foreign born is shown to be a very heavy one. It is well known that various societies in foreign countries have pursued the policy of sending to us large numbers of paupers, imbeciles, and aged persons, as well as criminals and other dangerous persons. They have employed such means to evade the responsibility and expense of continuous support for these classes. This has been partially stopped by recent laws prohibiting the entrance of such persons. But it has not altogether ceased. During the month of September, 1903, three hundred and sixty-two persons wore debarred on the ground that they were likely to become public charges. During the year over three thousand immigrants were rejected because they were insane, idiots, afflicted with dangerous, contagious diseases, or likely to become paupers. Vigilance alone prevents the entry of those obviously unfit. There is, however, no possibility of sifting out of the immense immigration of about one million persons annually all of the unfit persons. The inspection at best must be too cursory, and it is inconceivable that any agent of the Immigration Bureau should be skilled enough to determine unfitness by merely looking a person over. The Commissioner General has recently said that even those who have been rejected at the port of New York as unfit come over the borders elsewhere in large numbers. If this is true even those whom our laws recognize as unfit often succeed in making an entrance, and the immigrants who are generally undesirable because unintelligent, of low vitality and of poor physique, are not even prohibited from coming. It is difficult to keep out the latter class. For instance, it is not an easy matter to discover, except as a result of most careful, painstaking examinations of all immigrants, incipient tuberculosis or insanity of a recurring character. In fact, it is estimated that twenty-three thousand consumptive immigrants arrived in New York in 1902. It is well known that certain kinds of insanity are only temporarily cured. Furthermore, how is it possible to know at sight dangerous persons and criminals or the morally insane, who have been helped, by friends and relatives, to leave a foreign country? A case I came across recently in Switzerland is doubtless typical of the kind of dependents who come of their own will when they are not actually sent to us. An itinerant tailor, apparently strong, but afflicted with an incurable disease, was making his way through the mountains to Davos, where, he said, there was a hospital which he hoped would take him in. When he learned that we came from America, he exclaimed: " How I wish I could get there. The hospitals are free in your country."
According to the Census of 1890 there were, in proportion to population, over twice as many foreign-born inmates of charitable and penal institutions as there were native-born. Of paupers alone the foreign classes supply an even larger proportion. As long ago as 1887 there were in the city poorhouses of New York State over thirty-four thousand foreign born, while there were only eighteen thousand of the native born. Over 44 per cent of the paupers of Massachusetts are of foreign birth. Taking an equal number of persons from the foreign element and the native element, the foreign element furnishes four times as many paupers. These figures represent most important facts and should be given careful consideration. In view of them it can hardly be questioned that the recent immigrants were not all needed, for, granting that they came to the country in condition to be independent, self-supporting citizens, the wages they received were evidently not sufficient to prevent them from depending upon public relief for support. An interesting commentary upon what has been previously said concerning the Irish may be given here. By far the largest proportion of paupers in the almshouses are Irish. From observation, I should say that this is even more true of the paupers receiving outdoor relief, although there are no figures to be obtained on this matter. It must, however, be said that a large number of children of foreign parentage in charitable institutions are not there solely because of poverty. A great many of the poorest and most ignorant foreigners desire to have their children supported in public institutions. They often refer to such places as the " college " to which they are sending their children.
There has been no effort to determine the amount of money spent by the various states for the support of foreign-born paupers. It is reasonable, however, to suppose that it amounts to an immense sum yearly. The insane hospitals, to which the foreign element supply an unduly large proportion, are among the most expensive public institutions. Mr. Goodwin Brown, of the State Commission of Lunacy of New York, estimates that, in the course of ten years, about $50,000,000 are expended by the United States to care for the excess of foreign-born insane. The Italians show a very large proportion of insane in the asylums, hospitals, etc. Out of about twenty-four thousand insane persons in New York State, almost exactly one-half are foreign born, although only about one-fourth of the people of the state are foreign born. Mr. Brown says, in another place: "We know of instance after instance, in fact there are thousands of them, where they (the insane) have been only a few months out of a hospital on the other side. They are sane when they are admitted here-that is, they will pass the ordinary inspection; they find difficulty in procuring employment; they get out of money; they are away from their friends, and, naturally, they soon go to pieces, and then they are re-committed.... There are in stances of persons who have been re-committed as many as fifteen or twenty times."
The number of crimes committed by the foreign born is only slightly, if at all, above the due proportion. In the matter of intoxication and disorderly conduct, the foreign born furnish about three times as many offenders as the native born. For assault, burglary, larceny, and grand larceny, there is a slight predominance of foreign born. It is, however, among the children of foreign parentage that criminals are found in greatest number. The most vicious, confirmed, incorrigible child criminal is the child of foreign parents. As a tough and outlaw he has few, if any, equals. In the chapter on " The Child " some of the reasons for this have been given. The tremendous struggle with poverty which the foreigner makes in order to survive in the competitive labor strife means, in a great many cases, the sacrifice of the child in other words, the ruin of the Americanized foreigner. The parents, when they are illiterate or belong to Slavic, Balkan, or Mediterranean races, are rarely Americanized. Vice and crime, inconceivable to the adult immigrant, become habitual to the most neglected of the children of foreign parentage. It is really appalling to observe the extent of this ruin of childhood. Among all the foreign peoples, and especially among the Jews and the Italians of New York and Chicago, many of the children are developing habits of vice which are revolting in the extreme. A Jewish society has recently published in one of its reports, "The vice and crime, the irreligiousness, lack of self-restraint, indifference to social conventions, indulgence of the most degraded and perverted appetites, ... are daily growing more pronounced and more offensive." Out of every million of the voting population in Massachusetts, there were about nineteen thousand male criminals of foreign parents, while among the children of native parents there were only three thousand and ninety.9 In the five states where the recent immigrant most often finds his home, his children supply from two to six times as many criminals as the children of native parents. This is perhaps as strong an argument as any against excessive immigration. It not only illustrates clearly the fact that the recent immigrants must neglect their children in order to gain a livelihood, but also that the recent immigrants settle in the most degraded portions of our cities, and, while not themselves becoming in excessive numbers addicted to vice, bring up their children in surroundings which make them in large numbers vicious and criminally dangerous.
It is unnecessary to speak here especially of the amount of illiteracy which exists by reason of recent immigration. Despite the fact that it has been our national custom to spare no expense to educate our citizens, about half the foreigners in the slums are illiterate. And we are presented yearly with an enormous number of adults-this year there will be approximately one million immigrants-a large proportion of whom are illiterate. When they arrive after their fourteenth year, it is very unlikely that they will ever become literate. In a political democracy, where it is of the utmost importance that every citizen should understand the institutions of his country, and should be pre pared by reading for intelligent voting, the illiteracy, which extends to over six millions of our population, should be a matter of concern. The relation of illiteracy to crime is not fully known, but some figures gathered in Massachusetts show that, with the increase of illiteracy, there is an increase in the number of commitments to penal institutions for every crime except that of drunkenness. The immigrants from Austria, Poland, and Italy, being the most illiterate, were the most often committed to penal institutions. It is, however, only fair to repeat that the poor of the four great industrial states are largely foreign born or children of foreign parents. We should expect, therefore, that the foreign element would supply an excess of dependents. It is true of every country- it is true of purely American communities- that the poor supply an excess of criminals and dependents. It is one of the natural results of poverty. How far in excess the dependent foreign born and the criminals of foreign parentage are, it is not possible to determine from our present inadequate data. The facts, however, if they were known, would doubtless make a much less unfavorable showing for the foreign element than the proportions heretofore given indicate. It is not possible to give actual figures showing the cost to the state of almost unrestricted and indiscriminate immigration. That it is a great expense to the state and that it becomes increasingly large, because of the neglected children of immigrants, there is no question.
The heaviest burden of the immense immigration is, however, not borne by the state, which, after all, can, when necessary, afford to bear even larger burdens of this character. The real weight is borne by the poorest classes of our community (except those in the almshouses), namely, the unskilled workers. Unskilled labor is already too plentiful; nothing shows it more than the conditions which exist in many parts of the country in those places where unskilled laborers might profitably employ themselves, the recent immigrants refuse to go, and instead herd in factory and mining towns and in large cities, pulling like a heavy weight upon that class of laborers which is already too plentiful there. In times of industrial depression, such as we are facing now, the amount of unskilled labor vastly over-supplies the demand for it, and the distress, by reason of unemployment at such periods, becomes a calamity of national importance. We have seen elsewhere how serious the problem of unemployment is at all times. It is nowhere so great as among the classes which are increased by recent immigration. A surplus of laborers enables the meanest employer to oppress his workmen to the very limit of endurance. If it is to his advantage to have short seasons, an over-supply of labor enables him to push through large contracts of work in short periods of time, leaving the workmen at other times unemployed and in poverty. In the same way that surplus labor enables the individual manufacturer to supply his market in a short period of time, leaving his plant and workmen idle at other times, all manufacturers are enabled by surplus labor to supply sufficient products for the market, in a few years of great business activity, thereby necessitating, periodically, a long season, sometimes extending over years, when both plant and men must be idle. Both the Honorable Carroll D. Wright and Professor Richmond Mayo-Smith have shown how important a factor this over-supply of labor is in creating industrial depressions. The relation of immigration to the over-supply of labor, which, in part, causes industrial depressions, can be clearly seen. Even in times of increasing prosperity and of unusual industrial activity, the unskilled workers are not permitted to profit by the better times. Immigration instantly increases, the labor market is progressively overcrowded, and the wages in unskilled trades are thereby reduced to the lowest limit.
The unskilled workers are most largely drafted from the Chinese, Croatians, Greeks, Italians, Lithuanians, Magyars, Poles, Portuguese, Ruthenians, and Slovaks. When the women come, they also commonly work at such employments as they find open to them. I have seen hundreds of women employed in the stock yards, working in great tubs of blood and entrails, employed in this manner week in and week out, leaving their children at home uncared for in order to assist the men in their fight for livelihood. The assistance of the women has made the Italian a formidable competitor in any trade which he has undertaken. It happens, however, that women often become the competitors of their own husbands and sons, and, by their willingness to accept a lower wage, decrease the wage scale of all laborers. The fear of poverty intensifies the competition between the different nationalities, between the native and the foreigner, between the women and the men, between the adults and the children, so that it is a competition of standards, and the lowest standard prevails. Among the common laborers in coal mining and in the clothing and textile trades, this competition is always too intense. It amounts, at times, almost to a race war, so that the bitterest hatred often exists between the different nationalities. The recent pitched battle between fifty Italian laborers and seventy Irish rock-drillers in one of the Subway pits is an example of what often occurs between the conflicting races. In 1892 a visitor to the anthracite district of Pennsylvania was amazed at the heartless and cruel way in which the foreigners were treated by the Americans; but after remaining in the district some time, he began to excuse, if not to justify, the Americans, for he saw "a thousand idle Americans, and a like number of foreigners slaving for greatest waves of migration to America coincided with her boom periods when job opportunities were expanding and labor was badly needed. In times of depression in the United States, immigration fell away. One could argue, against Hunter, that eighty or ninety cents per day." Professor John R. Commons says, concerning the coal miners displaced by foreigners: "Many coal miners sought the western and northern metal fields; others turned to farming. In case migration is not available, the displaced workman may be able to rise on top of the immigrant and become his foreman, his boss, or the proprietor of his working place. On the other hand, the inferior individuals of the displaced classes, refusing to compete alongside the immigrant, and incapable or unwilling to rise and better their condition, fall into the class of hoodlums, tramps, and paupers."
The tragedy which results from this surplus of labor was strikingly shown in the work of a sculptor, exhibited at the World's Fair in Chicago. It is the custom in some places, in England for instance, for the foremen of the great factories to go out in the morning to the gate where the workmen, seeking employment, are gathered, and to throw out tickets to the number of employees needed. The group represents an intense struggle to obtain one of these tickets. The man fortunate enough to get it is the central figure. He holds it high above his head, resistant, but looks with compassion upon the struggling ones about him. A withered old man clings to him, begging for the ticket; a youth behind is plotting to seize it; a woman with babe in arms, trampled under the feet of the others, strives to protect the child; a tiny lad, with a wolfish hunger in his face, endeavors to clamber up on others in the hope of seizing the ticket. Let him, who will, go about the factory districts of the country and see this thing enacted in real life, not so obviously dramatical but with agony that is actual. It will then be easy for him to question a national policy of unrestricted immigration.
The political consequences are perhaps out of our province, although they are becoming more and more serious as the foreign colonies become an increasing source of power to corrupt politicians. The greater the poverty, the greater is the dependence of the foreigner upon either padrone or politician. It has been recently shown that naturalization papers can be had for $5 and a vote means a job. The present methods of naturalization outrage the principles and ideals which formerly underlay this legal process of initiating the foreigner into the full rights of American citizenship. At present it involves no qualifications on the part of the immigrant and becomes simply another method of encouraging venal voting. It is not easy to say to what extent the foreign elements are responsible for the political corruption in those sections in which they predominate. Our own history is an unclean one. The native element is guilty of the most dangerous political corruption. The Americans are the ones principally who buy up the state legislatures and city councils, who bribe the representatives of the people, and steal every privilege which yields a profit. The Irish-Americans are mainly responsible for bribe-taking because they are the successful politicians. The recently arrived immigrants are an unknown quality, but they are learning the game. Their ignorance and poverty make them easy tools. It is undoubtedly true that they play, though perhaps innocently, into the hands of the politicians, and temporarily, at any rate, enhance their power. The conditions in certain sections of New York City and Chicago- and especially in certain sections of Pennsylvania-prove this beyond question. Whether or not the dangers to democratic government, which reside in the present political corruption, can be as clearly demonstrated to these foreign element as to the native element, and whether or not they will respond to the higher appeal, are momentous questions. The personal power of ward politicians and saloon keepers and its appeal to the immediate selfishness of poor immigrants is a mighty political force, perhaps too mighty for the higher appeal to overcome until the mass of immigrants have been sufficiently educated and informed to be reached by the minority from which reform and revolt always emanate. The minority cannot build up a machine; they cannot gain their ends through personal power; they are necessarily dependent to a large extent upon public appeals and literature to make evils known and to demonstrate clearly their proposed reforms. The love and devotion which many of the immigrants manifest for democracy is beautiful and pathetic but their ignorance prevents them from knowing that their votes commonly support the very men who are selling themselves and their country to the most sinister Enemies of the Republic.
There are certain results of migratory movements which are even more important than those hitherto considered. It is generally thought that emigration has been of great value to Europe in that it has relieved a condition of over-population and congestion, thereby benefiting the poorer classes especially. It would seem, in support of this theory, that the twenty million persons who have emigrated to this country since 1820 must have left behind them less crowding and better industrial opportunities for the workers who remained at home. In other words, it is the popular belief that the migrations of the last century have worked a redistribution of population which has been of inestimable value both to foreign countries and to our own for the reason that additional workers have come here, where they have been needed for the development of the new country, and a less congested population left abroad, where there is at all times a large surplus of unemployed and suffering workers. Upon the face of the matter this view seems a right one, but it fails to take any account whatever of the influence of migratory movements upon the birth-rate. It is obvious that if when large numbers of persons emigrate from a country, their places are soon filled by an increase in the number of births, the result will not be as imagined, but instead that emigrating races will greatly increase in numbers. There seems to be little question but that this does result from emigration. It has been observed again and again that emigration from a country causes an increase in the number of children born in that country. William Farr noted that in Norfolk, England, emigration was followed by large families. Commenting upon this fact, he says that when the young people emigrate, the parents remaining at home "have on an average five children instead of two or three, or none." In almost every country of Europe the same tendency has been observed. Ireland is perhaps the only exception, and certain very definite economic causes are responsible for its extremely low birth-rate. Professor Richmond Mayo-Smith says: " Emigration does not threaten to depopulate the countries of Europe. Had there been no emigration during this century, it is not probable that the population of Europe would have been any greater than it is. The probabilities ate all the other way. Europe has never grown so fast as during the present century." These statements by two of the ablest students of vital statistics could be supported by facts from other writers if it were necessary. There is a strange and rather startling probability that the twenty million persons who have emigrated to this country have been replaced by twenty or so million persons who would not have been born had these emigrants remained at home. Their leaving Europe has simply meant more births. As paradoxical as it seems, the population of Europe has in all likelihood not been decreased at all by the leaving of the twenty million emigrants who have come to the United States. Economic conditions abroad have not been bettered for the reason that an increased number of children have been born to fill the places left vacant by the emigrating millions. Neither has the poverty nor the congestion abroad been diminished by emigration.
It is also generally thought that immigration to the United States has increased the population of this country by some twenty million persons, and therefore has vastly aided in the growth of our industrial life. But this popular impression has also been called into question. Professor John R. Commons, who is now perhaps our foremost student of the subject, says, in his study of Immigration for the Industrial Commission, " It is a hasty assumption which holds that immigration during the nine tenth century has increased the total population in the United States." Professor Commons' statement is based upon the same principle of the growth of population which was considered in the previous paragraph. Immigration to this country has a striking influence upon our birth-rate. As emigration tends to increase the number of births among those remaining at home, so immigration, it is thought, causes a decrease in the birth-rate of the persons already in the country to which immigrants come. The late President Francis A. Walker, who was the superintendent of the censuses of 1870 and 1880, and therefore at the fountainhead of information on the subject, vigorously maintained that had there been no immigration to this country during the last seventy years, the native element would have filled, by an increased number of births, "the places which the foreign element has usurped."9 According to his belief, had there been no immigration since 1830 we should nevertheless have had as large a population (of native American stock) as we now have with the twenty million foreign immigrants. He claimed that the coming of the foreign element caused a great decrease in the birth-rate of the native Americans, and that in consequence the foreign peoples are here in place of the native children who would have been born had there been no immigration during these years. This is one of the most important explanations of the much-discussed question of race-suicide, or, as one may choose to call it, the annihilation of the native American stock.
To certain people this reasoning will seem absurd, and especially will it appear so to those who are not familiar with the economic forces which act and react upon the birth-rate. There are certain facts, however, concerning the annihilation of the native American stock which cannot be questioned. During the last seventy years the birth-rate of the American element in certain sections of the United States has declined from one of the highest in the world to one of the lowest. Throughout the so called civilized world the greatest decline in birthrate, shown in the last century, is in Massachusetts. The native population in this and in one or two other New England states is not increasing. A writer in The Quarterly Journal of Economics concludes an instructive paper on the subject by saying that the native stock actually " seems to be diminishing." In the northeastern division the native birth-rate has fallen so enormously that the annual increase of children of foreign white parents is ten times as great as the increase of the children of native parentage.8 In the several states of Connecticut, Maine. Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont the annual death-rate in 1900 of the whites of native parentage exceeded the birth-rate by 1.5 per thousand while among those of foreign white parents the birth-rate exceeded the death-rate by 44.5 per thousand. In passing it is well to note that this birthrate among the foreign whites is considerably greater than that of Hungary, which has the highest birth-rate in Europe, and this would go to prove that the birthrate among immigrants is increased as a result of their migration, although it might be explained on the ground of the age distribution among the foreign element. The main conclusion, however, which is to be drawn from these facts, is that, if this decrease in the birth-rate of the native stock continues, the annihilation of the native element is only a matter of time.
However, the question which many persons will ask is not answered by these facts. Granting that the native element is disappearing, can it be proved that immigration is responsible for the annihilation? To account for the connection between immigration and the decreasing birth-rate, certain economic changes which have been found to affect the birthrate must be considered. There is a great mass of collected data showing that the birth-rate is in all countries affected by economic changes. For instance, Farr in his "Vital Statistics" concludes that 's war, abundance, dearth, high wages, periods of speculation," etc., have a direct effect upon the birth. rate. Von Mayr and others have shown that the number of births fluctuates with a change in the market price of wheat or rye. Professor Richmond Mayo-Smith, in summing up a chapter on "Births" in his " Statistics and Sociology," says that where the number "decreases suddenly, it shows the effect of war or of commercial distress or of economic disaster. Where it increases, it is generally a sign of economic prosperity." Hadley, Marshall, Newsholme, and others (not to go back as far as Malthus) have all reviewed more or less the influence of economic conditions upon the birth-rate. It is not a matter of theory, it is an observed fact that economic disaster and similar influences operate to decrease the birth-rate, and that prosperity or any improvement in economic conditions operates to increase the birth-rate. On the basis of these well-established facts we should expect a decrease in the birth-rate of Americans as soon as the foreigners began to come in sufficiently large numbers to cause distress among the native working-men; we should also expect an increase in the birth-rate abroad because of a large emigration, for the reason that industrial opportunities are temporarily improved and lastly, we should expect an increase in the birth-rate of foreigners in this country for the reason that the better wages and conditions here represent to them prosperity.
It has been repeatedly mentioned in this chapter that the coming of foreign immigrants presents itself to the workers already in this country as the coming of an economic disaster. The conflicts which occurred between the foreigners who came to this country in the forties and fifties and the native element are too well known to require mentioning. Their coming was a terrible economic disaster to the native workers. The Irish and Germans came to compete, they had a lower standard of living, and they drove the American element out of certain classes of work. It was a bitter conflict, and on that level the foreigner won. The native rose above the foreigner, or fell below him and became vagrant or hoodlum. An effect upon the native birth-rate was noticed immediately. A lower rate of increase was to be observed wherever the foreigner came. It is not a theory but a fact that the decline in the rate of increase among the native element began in those very districts to which the foreigner came in considerable numbers. There was to be observed a remarkable correspondence between the number of immigrants arriving and the decrease in the growth of the native population. In other words immigration to this country means not an increase in population, but, as President Walker says, " the substitution of one kind of man for another. "This position is very well stated by President Walker in Volume II of his "Discussions in Economics and Statistics." "The population," he says, "of 1790 was almost wholly a native and wholly an acclimated population, and for forty years afterwards immigration remained at 80 low a rate as to be practically of no account; yet the people of the United States increased in numbers more rapidly than has ever elsewhere been known, in regard to any considerable population, over any considerable area, through any considerable period of time. Between 1790 and 1830 the nation grew from less than four millions to nearly thirteen millions-an increase, in fact, of 227 per cent, a rate unparalleled in history. That increase was wholly out of the loins of our own people. Each decade had seen a growth of between 33 and 38 per cent, a doubling once in twenty-two or twenty-three years. During the thirty years which followed 1830, the conditions of life and reproduction in the United States were not less, but more, favorable than in the preceding period. Important changes relating to the practice of medicine, the food and clothing of people, the general habits of living, took place, which were of a nature to increase the vitality and reproductive capability of the American people. Throughout this period the standard of height, of weight, and of chest measurement was steadily rising, with the result that. of the men of all nationalities in the giant army formed to suppress the slaveholders' rebellion, the native American bore off the palm in respect to physical stature. The decline of this rate of increase among Americans began at the very time when foreign immigration first assumed considerable proportions; it showed itself first and in the highest degree in those regions, in those states, and in the very counties into which the foreigners most largely entered. It proceeded for a long time in such a way as absolutely to offset the foreign arrivals, so that in 1850, in spite of the incoming of two and a half millions of foreigners during thirty years, our population differed by less than ten thousand from the population which would have existed, according to the previous rate of increase, without reenforcement from abroad. These three facts, which might be shown by tables and diagrams, constitute a statistical demonstration such as is rarely attained In regard to the operation of any social or economic force.
"But it may be asked, Is the proposition that the arrival of foreigners brought a check to the native increase a reasonable one? Is the cause thus suggested one which has elsewhere appeared as competent to produce such an effect. I answer, yes. All human history shows that the principle of population is intensely sensitive to social and economic changes. Let social and economic conditions remain as they were, and population will go on increasing from year to year, and from decade to decade, with a regularity little short of the marvelous. Let social and economic conditions change, and population instantly responds. The arrival in the United States, between 1830 and 1840, and thereafter increasingly, of large numbers of degraded peasantry, created for the first time in this country distinct social classes, and produced an alteration of economic relations which could not fail powerfully to affect population. The appearance of vast numbers of men, foreign in birth and often in language, with a poorer standard of living, with habits repellent to our native people, of an industrial grade suited only to the lowest kind of manual labor, was exactly such a cause as by any student of population would be expected to affect profoundly the growth of the native population. Americans shrank alike from the social contact and the economic competition thus created. They became increasingly unwilling to bring forth sons and daughters who should be obliged to compete in the market for labor and in the walks of life with those whom they did not recognize as of their own grade and condition."
There is another closely associated economic cause of the annihilation of the native stock. There arc certain classes of the population who may be said to be the main population-producing classes It is a well-established fact that the wealthiest class in most countries is continually dying out--that is, the birth rate is so low that were it not for accessions to the class from other classes in the community, it would disappear. Benjamin Kidd says: "The attempts which have been made in the past by the nobles and power-holding classes in almost every country to perpetuate the stock of the privileged classes to which they have belonged have invariably failed." Galton, Lageneau, and others have shown that in both England and France the aristocratic families would entirely disappear were it not for recruits from below. This is well illustrated by the following table, prepared by Dr. J. Bertillon, and placed before the meeting of the International Statistical Institute held in St. Petersburg in 1897:
BIRTHS PER 1000 WOMEN PER ANNUM
| CLASSIFICATION | PARIS | BERLIN | VIENNA | LONDON |
| Very poor quarters | 108 | 57 | 200 | 147 |
| Poor quarters | 95 | 129 | 164 | 140 |
| Comfortable quarters | 72 | 114 | 155 | 107 |
| Very comfortable quarters | 65 | 96 | 153 | 107 |
| Rich quarters | 53 | 63 | 107 | 87 |
| Very rich quarters | 34 | 47 | 71 | 63 |
| Average | 80 | 102 | 153 | 109 |
It is a generally observed fact that the mass of laborers in certain parts of the United States are either foreign born or of foreign parentage. To a remarkable extent the native born have risen out of this class, although a certain portion have evaded competition by emigrating to states having fewer immigrants, and not a few have been crushed beneath the foreigners. In the manufacturing, mechanical, and common laboring classes of several Eastern states the foreigners are three or four times as numerous as the natives. In other words, the natives of these states have been forced out of that class, which is known to be the great population-producing class. Those who have fallen below the foreign workers have been largely forced into the vicious classes, who fortunately never have a large birth-rate, and those natives who have been successful have, to a considerable extent, entered into the propertied and the professional classes, which always have relatively a small birth-rate. They were able to rise out of the lower class by marrying later and by having fewer children or none, and the desire to maintain the higher social position has been a continued incentive to limit the number of children.
The process which is at work in this struggle of the races has, therefore, not only in the past lowered the birth-rate among the natives, but will continue to lower it as the natives leave the classes which have the higher birth-rate. It can hardly be expected that any incentive toward the increase of population will become powerful enough to counter act the forces which are increasingly diminishing the birth-rate of the native stock. In the South and West, where there are fewer immigrants, the native stock will probably remain dominant in the population groups, but in the northeastern division of the states the foreign element is fast becoming dominant.
The evils, therefore, of immigration, if they are to be called evils, are not temporary. The direct descendants of the people who fought for and founded the Republic, and who gave us a rich heritage of democratic institutions, are being displaced by the Slavic, Balkan, and Mediterranean peoples. This is the fact in the problem of immigration which is of greatest importance. Discussion of the problem should be elevated to a different plane from that which has been taken in the past. It involves too much socially and politically in the world's progress to be ignored or lightly considered. It is a question of babies and birth-rates, and whatever decision is made regarding immigration, it is perforce a decision concerning the kind of children that shall be born. The decision for Congress to make consciously and deliberately is simply whether or not it is better for the world that the children of native parents should be born instead of the children of foreign parents. The making of the decision cannot be avoided. It is made now, although unconsciously, and it is a decision against the children of native parents. Immigration, therefore, means that, by permitting free and unlimited entry, we are stimulating the birthrate both in this country and abroad of Italians, Hungarians, Lithuanians, Ruthenians, Croatians, and Polish, Roumanian, and Russian Jews. This increase means that the places of those who emigrate to this country are filled in a generation, and the misery and oppression, which emigration is supposed to relieve, continue unimproved, while in the United States the peasantry from other countries, degraded by foreign oppression, are supplanting the descendants of the original stock of this country. This is the race-suicide, the annihilation of our native stock, which unlimited immigration forces upon us, none the less powerfully because it is gradually and stealthily done. The native stock of America, possessed of rare advantages, freed by its own efforts from oppression and the miseries of oppression, might have peopled the United States with the seventy millions which now inhabit it. It has not done so for the reason that "we cannot welcome an indefinite number of immigrants to our shores without forbidding the existence of an indefinite number of children of native parents who might have been born."
Immigration presents for our serious consideration a formidable array of dangers. It is unnecessary to summarize the facts and the arguments which have been given. These are the two things which, of all that have been stated, seem the most important: the likelihood of race annihilation and the possible degeneration of even the succeeding American type. It seems unquestionable that the unfittest class of immigrants that have ever come to our shores is increasing yearly in numbers. We may and should be willing to permit our native stock to be annihilated by a superior people but it is inconceivable that we should knowingly promote, by conscious act, an intermarrying and intermingling of peoples, which will indefinitely lower the standard of American or any other manhood. If this is to result from an unrestricted and practically unselected immigration, that conscious act is taken at Ellis Island and at other ports of entry, after the legal decision compelling it has been made by Act of Congress. Our philanthropic institutions are yearly making larger provision for segregating the feeble-minded in order to prevent propagation. This is observing the necessity for exercising some selection, when it is possible, as to the kind of children that shall be born. There is extreme necessity in such cases, which does not exist in the case of immigration. In the latter case, however, selection may be powerfully exercised in deciding the class of immigrants that may land in America The fathers and mothers of American children can be chosen, and it is in the power of Congress to decide upon what merits. By wise regulation of immigration selection can be exercised so as to increase the number of strong-minded children, as it is used, in the former instance, to decrease the number of feeble-minded children.
There are few questions which it would seem easier to decide upon purely moral grounds than this one of immigration. Whether or not we should restrict immigration is perhaps after all not so fundamentally important as the fact that in deciding the question, as it is now decided, our governing bodies have not considered the welfare of the people, either immigrants or Americans. The decision has been made as a result of pressure brought to bear upon public officials by private and selfish interests. Our national characteristics may be changed our love of freedom; our religion; our inventive faculties; our standard of life. All of the things, in fact, for which America has been more or less distinctive among the nations may be entirely altered. Our race may be supplanted by another,-by an Asiatic one, for instance,-and not because it is better so nor because it is for the world's good. On the contrary, it is in order that the individuals interested in steamships may be benefited and in order that the employers may have cheaper labor. These selfish forces may be disguised, but they are there and they are active. One appalling social problem, which caused a terrible civil war and which still awaits solution, was forced upon us by the selfishness of the slave-traders, the ship-owners, and the southern land-owners. One entire race, the Negro, came for their profit. It almost ruined the South, and it is still problematical whether, in the face of race hatred, we shall be able to maintain in the South a political democracy. Like selfish forces are to-day at work creating new social problems which may be even more baffling to the future generations.
CONCLUSION
In the previous chapters I have only touched here and there upon the struggle with poverty which the poor themselves make. We are perhaps too prone to think of those in poverty as effortless beings, who make no fight for themselves and wait in misery until some one comes to assist them. Such an opinion is without any foundation. It is based upon knowledge gained by acquaintance with the pauper and vagrant, and is in no wise applicable to the workers in poverty. It is small wonder that workers who are underfed, underclothed, and poorly housed, are sometimes won from their hard and almost hopeless toil by sensual pleasures. Nor is it surprising that they are driven to despair by the brutal power of the economic forces which dominate their lives. Without the security which comes only with the ownership of property, without a home from which they may not be evicted, without any assurance of regular employment, without tools with which they may employ themselves, they are pathetically dependent upon their physical efficiency,--their health and strength, and upon the activity of machinery, owned by others, 3,8 and worked or left idle as the owners consider it wise or profitable. In their weak and unorganized condition, they are unlike the skilled workers, made powerful by their unions and by their methods of collective bargaining; they are fighting alone, each one against another. In watching during the last few years the struggle with poverty of this poorest class of workers I have again and again read the allegory with which Dante begins his great poem, each time feeling more and more how wonderfully it pictures this struggle. The bewildered traveller, weary and terrified, is toiling up a steep and uncertain path of a mountain. His eyes are lifted to the "rose of dawn," which sends to him a glow of hope and leads him on. As he laboriously toils upward, a leopard (significant of sensuality), bright and beautiful, almost irresistibly attracts him; and from time to time, as he wearily pauses for rest, "that fair creature with the spotted hide" fills him, with sensations of pleasure. Suddenly his heart is filled with terror by a lion, fierce and terrible, which threatens to devour him; and from another quarter appears a lean and hungry she-wolf with "all ill-greed defiled." Losing all hope, he turns and flees from the dangers which beset his "life's course.
It would be absurd to think that Dante meant to picture the problem of poverty. The statesman, the theologian, the psychologist, has each made the allegory serve a purpose, according to the bias of his thought. And, in the same way, reading our own thought into the lines, there could hardly be a more powerful picture than this one of the dangers and difficulties which beset those of our people who are in poverty, or of the almost hopeless struggle which presents itself as life to those of our people who are underpaid, underfed, underclothed, badly housed, and overworked.
To make the matter clear, a few words-and these, unfortunately, too much of a personal nature-are perhaps necessary. Having been drawn, about twelve years ago, to some interest in the problems of poverty, there happened to me the common experience of all those of like interests. The poor in the broader sense of that word were busily at work and trying rather to conceal than to make evidence of their poverty; while the beggars, vagrants, idlers, and dependents of all sorts were more or less always pressing forward their necessities. It was natural, therefore, for me to confuse the problem of poverty with that of pauperism and to take up with some enthusiasm the ideas which are a part of the propaganda of many useful charitable organizations. To the charitable workers these problems of vagrancy and pauperism seem possible of solution. Many reforms- among which wise giving, friendly visiting, work. rooms, work-tests, model lodging-houses, rent-collecting, etc., are a few-were, in the early nineties, making rapid headway. They were, at that time, ranked first in importance in the category of organized movements for diminishing the evils of pauperism. Many committees were at work promoting these reforms, and in different cities I was able to help in their efforts. The result of their work was not discouraging, but in every instance they came hard up against one almost insurmountable obstacle. The pauper and the vagrant were not dissatisfied they clamored for alms, but they did not wish to alter their way of living. Even those who possessed the capacity for industrial usefulness and who might have become self-supporting did not wish to go back again into the factories, mills, or mines. In fact, so far as one could see, they were as unwilling as the others to alter their ways of living. However miserable their lot seemed to those of us on the Committees, to them it seemed to be, on the whole, acceptable enough to bring a certain sort of content. However malarious and poisonous and undrained, they loved their valley of idleness and quiet; they hated the hill upon which they were constrained to toil; they shrank from its disappointments, its bruises, its weariness and bitterness, while its meanness and ugliness of life were but slightly less mean and ugly than their own. The children, bred into the ways of pauperism, nearly always took up the vices of their parents. They were pleasure-loving, and whatever was toilsome seemed abhorrent to them. The girls took the easier path it appeared unquestionably more desirable to their childish standards, and for a time at least it gave them more of everything, for which most human beings seem to hunger, -finery, leisure, and a kind of pleasure. The men and boys liked vagrancy, and those who were not attracted to these ways settled down into a satisfied, imperturbable pauperism. They lived in God only knows what misery. They ate when there were things to eat; they starved when there was lack of food. But, on the whole, although they swore and beat each other and got drunk, they were more contented than any other class I have happened to know. It took a long time to understand them. Our Committees w ere busy from morning until night in giving them opportunities to take up the fight again, and to become independent of relief. They always took what we gave them; they always promised to try; but as soon as we expected them to fulfil any promises, they gave up in despair, and either wept or looked ashamed, and took to misery and drink again,-almost, so it seemed to me at times, with a sense of relief. I am reminded now of a vagrant whom I knew well and for many years believed to be sincerely trying to become "a man," as we used to say. He has turned up wherever I have happened to be-in Chicago or New York. He has always looked me up, and together we have conspired to overcome his vagrant instincts. We have always failed, and after a few weeks' work Jerry disappears, and I know what has become of him. At last, in his case as in many others, I have become convinced that he is more satisfied and content with the life of a vagrant than with the miserable lot of an unskilled, underpaid workman.
But as long as one works with, or observes only, the dependent classes, the true, or at least what seems to me the true, explanation of this apparent satisfaction of vagrants and paupers remains in the dark. It was not until I had lived for several years among the toilers in a great industrial community that the reason for the content of the dependent classes became clear to me. In this community of workers several thousand human beings were struggling fiercely against want. Day after day, year after year, they toiled with marvelous persistency and perseverance. Obnoxious as the simile is, they worked from dawn until nightfall, or from sunset until dawn, like galley slaves under the sting of want and under the whip of hunger. On cold, rainy mornings, at the dusk of dawn, I have been awakened, two hours before my rising time, by the monotonous clatter of hobnailed boots on the plank sidewalks, as the procession to the factory passed under my window. Heavy, brooding men, tired, anxious women, thinly dressed, unkempt little girls, and frail, joyless little lads passed along, half awake, not one uttering a word as they hurried to the great factory. From all directions thousands were entering the various gates,-children of every nation of Europe. Hundreds of others-obviously a hungrier, poorer lot than those entering the gates; some were most ragged and almost shoeless, but all with eager faces-waited in front of a closed gate until finally a great red-bearded man came out and selected twenty-three of the strongest, best-looking of the men. For these the gates were opened, and the others, with downcast eyes, marched off to seek employment elsewhere or to sit at home, or in a saloon, or in a lodging-house, until the following morning, when they came wistfully again to some factory gate. In this community, the saddest in which I have ever lived, fully fifty thousand men, women, and children were all the time either in poverty or on the verge of poverty. It would not be possible to describe how they worked and starved and ached to rise out of it. They broke their health down; the men acquired in this particular trade a painful and disabling rheumatism, and consumption was very common. The girls and boys followed in the paths of their parents. The wages were so low that the men alone often could not support their families, and mothers with babies toiled in order to add to the income. They gave up all thought of joyful living, probably in the hope that by tremendous exertion they could overcome their poverty; but they gained while at work only enough to keep their bodies alive. Theirs was a sort of treadmill existence with no prospect of anything else in life but more treadmill. When they were not given work in the mill, they starved; and when they grew desperate, they came to my office and asked for charity. Here was a mass of men whose ways of living were violently opposed to those of the vagrant or the pauper. They were distorting themselves in the struggle to be independent of charity and to overcome poverty. That they hated charity must be taken without question. The testimony of scores of men is proof of it, even if, indeed, their very lives were not. But despite all their efforts they lived in houses but little, if any, better than those of the paupers; they were almost as poorly dressed; they were hardly better fed.
In other words, these men, women, and children were, to my mind, struggling up the face of a barren precipice,-not unlike that up which Dante toiled, -sometimes in hope, sometimes in despair, yet bitterly determined; the abyss of vice, crime, pauperism, and vagrancy was beneath them, a tiny ray of hope above them. Flitting before them was the leopard, persistently trying to win them from their almost hopeless task by charms of sensuality, debauch, and idleness. The lion, predatory and brutal, threatened to devour them; the she-wolf (Greed), hungry for them, enriched herself by their labors. Some were won from their toil by sensual pleasures, some were torn from their footholds by economic disorders, others were too weak and hungry to keep up the fight, and still others were rendered incapable of further struggle by diseases resulting from the unnecessary evils of work or of living.
This may seem to many persons an overdrawn simile; so, at any rate, it would have seemed to me several years ago. But it is a true picture, and I am convinced a just simile of the conditions in which the mass of those workers live who are already defined as being in poverty. At any rate, two or three things seem clearer to me now, after arriving at the conclusion so well represented by Dante's picture. It is easier to understand the reason for the abhorrence which the pauper and the vagrant and the prostitute have for that terrible struggle with poverty, and only less easy is it to understand their apparent willingness to live on rubbish or alms. Furthermore, it is clear that the poverty which undermines the workers is the great and constantly active cause of the fixed states of degeneracy represented by the pauper, the vagrant, the inebriate, etc. In other words, when the working people, by reason of whatever misery poverty brings, once fall into the abyss, they so hate the life of their former struggles and disappointments and sorrows that almost no one, however well-intentioned or kindly, can induce them to take it up again. In the abyss they become merely breeders of children, who persist in the degeneration into which their fathers have fallen; and, like the tribe of Ishmael or the family of the Jukes, they have neither the willingness nor the capacity to respond to the efforts of those who would help, or force, them back again into the struggle.
However merciful and kind and valuable the works of the charitable and the efforts of those who would raise up again the pauper and the vagrant, they are not remedial. In so far as the work of the charitable is devoted to reclamation and not to prevention, it is a failure. Not that any one could wish that less were done in the direction of reclamation. The fact only is important that effort is less powerful there than in overcoming the forces which undermine the workers and those who are struggling against insurmountable difficulties. It is an almost hopeless task to regenerate the degenerate, especially when, if the latter are to succeed, they must be made to take up again the battle with those very destructive forces which are all the time undermining stronger, more capable, and more self-reliant men than they. The all-necessary work to be done is not so much to reclaim a class which social forces are ever active in producing, as it is to battle with the social or economic forces which are continuously producing recruits to that class. The forces producing the miseries of pauperism and vagrancy are many, but none are so important as those conditions of work and of living which are so unjust and degrading that men are driven by them into degeneracy. When the uncertainties, hardships, trials, sorrows, and miseries of a self-supporting existence become so painful that good, strong, self-reliant men and women are forced into pauperism, then there is but little use in trying to force the paupers and the vagrants back into the struggle.
It is not necessary to debate the relative importance of individual or social forces, or of heredity or environment, upon the extent of poverty, in order to prove that social forces are constantly and everywhere active in bringing poverty to a great mass of people. Leaving all such questions out of the discussion, we can nevertheless be certain that obstacles can be too great for even the strongest of men to overcome. And this is almost precisely what happens to the masses in poverty. As a class they have the longest hours of work, they have the lowest pay- often not even living wages they have competition of the severest kind to face-unskilled workers from every land come to seek their employment; they are oppressed by sweating methods, their employment is irregular their tenements are the most insanitary, and their rents relatively the highest that any class pay; the prices for food and fuel are exorbitant, because they must buy in small quantities when they find it necessary to go into debt they are fleeced by loan sharks they are most often ill; they bear the burden of more deaths than any other class; and being without savings, they are in actual distress as soon as they are unable to work, or as soon as they are unemployed as a result of economic or other causes. Furthermore, the children are prevented from having fair opportunities to master the difficulties which ruined their fathers. Their health is imperilled and not seldom destroyed by insanitary homes they are injured morally and otherwise by a necessary street life; their food is in many cases so poor that it will not feed the brain, and they are consequently unable to learn; they are early pressed to do a man's labor and are often ruined physically and blighted in other ways by this early and unnatural toil. With all of these and many other obstacles and disadvantages working their ruin, only the strongest and most fortunate are able to put forth the struggle necessary to master their fate. For the others, their life's course lies up an almost baffling precipice.
About a half-century ago there were so many persons in London becoming paupers, vagrants, mendicants, etc., that a group of people organized together to make the way of the pauper, vagrant, and mendicant so thorny and difficult that the workers, toiling up the precipice, would hold the abyss beneath them in even greater aversion than it was thought they were in the habit of doing, and that the able-bodied dependents in the abyss would be forced to turn from their way and seek again the path of self-support. This may, in certain places and at certain times, be necessary; but would it not seem a more wholesome, not to say kindlier, policy to see that the obstacles-the unnecessary obstacles, now preventing the rise of those workers in poverty-be removed?
This, however, is not by any means easy of accomplishment. The first difficulty lies in the complex nature of the problem itself. It is inextricably woven in with all other social and economic problems. If what Charles Booth says is true (and many economists agree with him), that our "modern system of industry will not work without some unemployed margin, some reserve of labor;" if it is necessary, as another economist has said, that "for long periods of time large stagnant pools of adult effective labor power must lie rotting in the bodies of their owners, unable to become productive of any form of wealth, because they cannot get access to the material of production"; and if at the same time "facing them in equal idleness are unemployed or under-employed masses of land and capital, mills, mines, etc., which, taken in conjunction with this labor power, are theoretically competent to produce wealth for the satisfaction of human wants," --if these things are essential to our modern system of production, then the poverty of this large mass of workers must continue unrelieved until the system itself is reorganized. As a matter of fact, it would be useless to deny or ignore the fact that much of our poverty is directly due to a whole series of economic disorders which seem actually to make waste of human life necessary. And, in so far as poverty is a result of such deeply seated and fundamental economic disorders, due either to the method by which industry is organized or to the present ownership of the means and materials of production, it will, in all probability, find a solution only through struggles between the workers and the capitalists. No one who watches the trend of the times can doubt that these struggles, both in the industrial and in the political field, are growing more and more serious. Furthermore, in so far as poverty is a result of individual weaknesses, not themselves due to social causes, it can be dealt with only by moral and personal forces. But complex as the problem is, and varied as the remedies must be, we may be sure that poverty is, to a considerable extent, due to social causes which are clearly to be seen and which are possible of remedy.
Besides the complexity of the problem, there is still another, perhaps an even greater, obstacle firmly set in the path of constructive reform. And this is a political difficulty; namely, the anarchic principle of state rights which divides this country into two score and more small legislative areas. National problems of the character herein dealt with cannot therefore be treated in a national way, as they are in most countries abroad. Legislation concerning child labor, tuberculosis, tenements, factories, dangerous trades, sanitation, etc., must be of a variety of kinds, often warring with each other, throwing industrial advantages now to this state and now to that. The child-labor laws which have been won in the Northern states by years of vigorous agitation give an advantage to the parasitic industries of the South. It is even likely that the textile industry may move to the South partly at least in order to have the privilege of employing little children. Manufacturers threaten the state legislatures (more often, to be sure, than they carry out the threat) that they will move into another state if any laws protecting the workmen are passed. There is perhaps a certain business justification for such protests, for, unquestionably, by reason of our legislative anarchy, a parasitic industry in one state may thrive while an industry in another state, shorn of its parasitic privileges by legislation, may remain at a standstill, if it does not actually lose its trade. For this reason social and industrial legislation is usually more difficult to obtain in America than in any other great industrial country. Our political machinery itself, therefore, seriously retards and perhaps renders impossible any national standard of education, of sanitation, of working or of living conditions, etc. It is probable that there can be no national solution of some of these more remedial of the problems of poverty.
Another obstacle stands in the way of justice. The selfish interests of capitalists and land-owners too often either prevent good legislation or vitiate, by their influence, its enforcement. One can understand the determined opposition of men to socialistic measures seriously changing or violating the so-called rights of property; but it is not so easy to understand opposition to measures which, while affecting property interests, do not destroy any rights which may be exercised without injury to another. When property rights become property wrongs by injuring others, especially when they cause the physical degeneration and the human misery represented in poverty, they may for a time, but will surely not always, stand in the way of remedial action. The sense of justice may for a time be so warped and distorted as to value property more than human life, but only for a time. The real cause of our present errors of judgment in this matter lies in the corruption of our political institutions. The business and propertied interests have bought the bosses of our political machinery, and at present our laws are made and enforced in the interest of the owners. When the shame of our cities is notorious; when state and national governments are in the hands of corrupt politicians, owned by corporate interests when " the laws which should preserve and enforce all rights are made and enforced by dollars;" when "it is possible ... with dollars to 'steer' the selection of the candidates of both the great parties for the highest office in our Republic, ... so that the people, as a matter of fact, must elect one of the 'steered' candidates;" when "it is possible to repeat the operation in the selection of candidates for the executive and legislative conduct and control of every state and municipality in the United States, and with a sufficient number of dollars to 'steer ' the doings of the law-makers and law-enforcers of the national, state, and municipal governments of the people, and a sufficient proportion of the court decisions to make absolute any power created by such direction; " when the country is being daily betrayed by the " enemies of the republic,"-it seems utopian to appeal to these powers to do justice to their workers. This may seem a dark view to take of our political institutions, but, considering the great mass of evidence accumulated in the last few years, it is surely warranted. So far as the problem of poverty is concerned, we can perhaps hope for little in the way of justice or reform during the next few years. For, by the help of this corruption, reform is fought at three stages: in the legislature, in the courts, and at the time of its enforcement.
In consequence of this temporary perversion of our democratic institutions pessimism runs high. Professor Franklin H. Giddings, our most distinguished sociologist, says: "We are witnessing to-day, beyond question, the decay-perhaps not permanent, but at any rate the decay-of republican institutions. No man in his right mind can deny it." A president of one of our greatest universities prophesies that we shall have an emperor in the United States in twenty-five years. Charles Fourier may have been right when he prophesied one hundred years ago that "vast joint-stock companies, destined to monopolize and control all branches of industry, commerce, and finance, would establish an industrial or commercial feudalism that would control society by the power of capital. as did the old baronial or military feudalism by the power of the sword" and " by the monopoly of the land." Or again we may have Mr. Ghent's benevolent feudalism. t If this be the tendency of the times, the poverty of the ten million people of this country will receive scant attention. Indeed, poverty will become wider spread and grow more distressing. Even the moderate proposals for reform made in this book will, if viewed solely from the standpoint of their effect upon property, seem radical, and, in so far as they affect property interests, unjust. This is not mere speculation. I could mention a score of incidents connected with efforts to get child-labor or tenement-house legislation in Illinois and New York to prove that this is even now true. Progress on these reform lines has been so slow in the last decade as to seem almost no progress. Much of the best legislation has been won only after a bitter fight with the propertied interests; and legislation, once secured, simply cannot, in most cases, be enforced because the political machine is owned by the propertied classes. Furthermore, when any so-called reform administration does enforce the laws, the corporate interests lump their campaign donations and punish the reformers with ignominious defeat. However, the difficulties which lie in the way of any progress along social reform lines are beside the purpose of this book. That purpose is largely satisfied when the problem is stated, and, in so far as possible, I have summarized it in the following sentences. There are probably in fairly prosperous years no less than l0,000,000 persons in poverty; that is to say, underfed, underclothed, and poorly housed. Of these about 4,000,000 persons are public paupers. Over 2,000,000 working-men are unemployed from four to six months in the year. About 500,000 male immigrants arrive yearly and seek work in the very districts where unemployment is greatest. Nearly half of the families in the country are propertyless. Over 1,700,000 little children are forced to become wage-earners when they should still be in school. About 5,000,000 women find it necessary to work and about 2,000,000 are employed in factories, mills, etc. Probably no less than 1,000,000 workers are injured or killed each year while doing their work, and about 10,000,000 of the persons now living will, if the present ratio is kept up, die of the preventable disease, tuberculosis. We know that many workmen are overworked and underpaid. We know in a general way that unnecessary disease is far too prevalent. We know some of the insanitary evils of tenements and factories; we know of the neglect of the street child, the aged, the infirm, the crippled. Furthermore, we are beginning to realize the monstrous injustice of compelling those who are unemployed, who are injured in industry, who have acquired diseases due to their occupation, or who have been made widows or orphans by industrial accidents, to become paupers in order that they may be housed, fed, and clothed. Something is known concerning these problems of poverty, and some of them at least are possible of remedy.
To deal with these specific problems, I have elsewhere mentioned some reforms which seem to me preventive in their nature. They contemplate mainly such legislative action as may enforce upon the entire country certain minimum standards of working and of living conditions. They would make all tenements and factories sanitary they would regulate the hours of work, especially for women and children; they would regulate and thoroughly supervise dangerous trades; they would institute all necessary measures to stamp out unnecessary disease and to prevent unnecessary death; they would prohibit entirely child labor; they would institute all necessary educational and recreational institutions to replace the social and educational losses of the home and the domestic workshop; they would perfect, as far as possible, legislation and institutions to make industry pay the necessary and legitimate cost of producing and maintaining efficient laborers; they would institute, on the lines of foreign experience, measures to compensate labor for enforced seasons of idleness, due to sickness, old age, lack of work, or other causes beyond the control of the workman; they would prevent parasitism on the part of either the consumer or the producer and charge up the full costs of labor in production to the beneficiary, instead of compelling the worker at certain times to enforce his demand for maintenance through the tax rate and by becoming a pauper; they would re. strict the power of employer and of ship-owner to stimulate for purely selfish ends an excessive immigration, and in this way to beat down wages and to increase unemployment.
Reforms such as these are not ones which will destroy incentive, but rather they will increase incentive by more nearly equalizing opportunity. They will make propertied interests less predatory, and sensuality, by contrast with misery, less attractive to the poor. Or, in the terms of our simile, the greyhound-which Dante promised would one day come -will come to drive away the lion, the leopard, and the she-wolf. This does not mean that there is to be no struggle,-the mountain must still remain,- but rather that the life of the poorest toiler shall not be a hopeless thing from which many must turn in despair. In other words, the process of Justice is to lift stony barriers, against which the noblest beat their brains out, and from which the ignoble (but who shall say not more sensible ?) turn away in despair. Let it be this, rather than a barren relief system, administered by those who must stand by, watching the struggle, lifting no hand to aid the toilers, but ever succoring those who flee and those who are bruised and beaten.
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