BECAUSE this is a land of liberty a great many foreigners imagine it a land of license. To do them justice, they do not know any better. But we do, and it is our duty to teach them the difference. If we don’t, we, not they, will be the principal sufferers.

The subject of immigration has been largely discussed by the newspapers of late, and a good deal of demagogy has been got off in Congress on the same subject. But sensible people are pretty well agreed that it is time to put some restriction upon the use of America as a common dumping ground for the world’s offal and rubbish. This country is not an asylum for criminals or paupers. That ought to go without saying and it should not require any argument to prove, but it seems we have been very careless in this direction. A short time ago the New York Herald said: “America is no longer to be considered the legitimate dumping ground for the paupers, the idiots, the insane and the criminals of Europe,” and Congressman Ford, chairman of the Immigration{352} Committee and father of the bill which was presented in January, made the statement that “if the law could be strictly enforced I believe our immigration would be decreased from these sources at least one hundred and fifty thousand per annum.” This is an awful proportion of the aggregate of immigration, for the entire figure exceeds half a million per year very little. Still Mr. Ford may be supposed, from his position, to know what he is talking about, for his committee has spent a great amount of time in examining a great many witnesses who are supposed to understand the nature of the immigration to this country of the peoples of the whole world. But enough about paupers, idiots, insane and criminals; everybody is agreed that we do not want them.

Are there any other classes whom we do not want? Yes; we cannot afford to have the contract laborer. The native labor organizations have talked a good deal of nonsense about the foreigner, but not on this one subject. The importation on contract of men to do a certain amount of work for a smaller sum than American citizens would accept, and to carry back almost all their earnings to be spent in another country, is a very successful way of making a nation poor. If we were to send all of our money to Europe for the purchase of supplies and Europe were to buy nothing of us in return, it would soon be{353}


Image not available: PERSPECTIVE VIEW LOOKING SOUTH, SHOWING END OF WORLD’S COLUMBIAN EXPOSITION.
PERSPECTIVE VIEW LOOKING SOUTH, SHOWING END OF WORLD’S COLUMBIAN EXPOSITION.

impossible to raise enough coin to buy a postage stamp. Yet contract labor is a transaction of exactly the same nature, and it is increasing at a rate that may be estimated from the known ability and willingness of large employers to have work done as cheaply as possible, regardless of the consequences to every one but themselves.

When, however, statesmen or politicians, or demagogues or well-meaning labor agitators or leaders, insist that skilled labor should be kept out of the country, it is to the interest of the community to firmly, persistently and indignantly oppose any such proposition. Lack of skilled labor is the curse of the country. Because a man is employed on work which requires skill and experience is no sign that he is fully competent to do it. The tramps who bind the farmer’s wheat, the cast-aways and chance laborers who build some houses in the West, the riff-raff who are gathered together occasionally to work a mine, or sail a ship, or do the work of a plantation or a farm for a short season, are the most costly labor that could be employed, and a great deal of work supposed to be done by experts in the United States is almost as expensive. So long as we don’t allow young men to learn trades—and that seems to be the rule at present—we must have men who have learned trades somewhere else. Plenty of Americans can be found in New York city at half an hour’s notice who{354} complain with real patriotic feeling that, while they would like all their own employés to be Americans, they cannot find a large number or even a respectable majority of natives who are sufficiently skilled to do the work for which they are called upon. The consumption of pianofortes, for instance, in the United States, is twenty times as great, according to statistics of trade, as in any other country of equal population in the world. But in going through a piano factory one might very quickly imagine himself in a foreign country. It is not that the manufacturers are all foreigners, for they are not, or that they prefer foreign labor, or that foreign piano-makers work cheaper than those of native birth, but simply because we have scarcely any of native birth, although this variety of manufacturing industry has been active in this country for nearly two generations.

In many other of the mechanical arts the same lack of native skilled labor is manifested. The wall-paper printers, the engravers, the better class of weavers, and several other mechanical arts, which require the services of draughtsmen and colorists, are almost all obliged to depend upon men of foreign birth for their work. It is pleasing to realize that most of these foreign workmen are now naturalized American citizens and probably quite as loyal to the union and the Constitution as any of our native-born operatives,{355} but the probabilities are, that as they grow old or disabled, and have to be replaced, the new men must come from the same sources as the old. Between Americans not being allowed to learn trades, and Americans not being willing to learn trades, we are pretty badly off for mechanical labor unless we can depend upon foreign countries.

We need not blame foreigners for this; we have only our own selves to blame and our own people. The reason for the general dependence upon foreign labor, beside the inability of young men who wish to learn a trade to be allowed to follow their inclinations, is that the most of our own people are rapidly getting above anything and everything that does not afford an opportunity for speculation. Beside, it is one of the inevitable results of the theory of social equality, a theory which must do a great deal more harm than it yet has done before we abandon it, that, as the wealth and prosperity of the country increases, and new opportunities of making money multiply, the sons of farmers and mechanics will be reluctant to follow the occupations of their fathers. We have heard a great deal about the unwillingness of the Hebrews to indulge in any mechanical or routine labor, and their avidity to enter all branches of trade where barter and sale are the principal occupations, but the modern American can double discount{356} the Hebrew in this particular and then get ahead of him about as often as not.

There is no sign that the native-born American youth will revert to the good old custom of his fathers, and endeavor to learn a trade, even if he were able to do it. It is unfashionable to work with one’s hands in a country where most of the money is made by working with one’s wits. The mechanic’s son, and the farmer’s son, and the day laborer’s son gets as good a common-school education as the children of the richest men in the town, and has equal opportunities for going into mercantile business, or for entering the offices of business houses and corporations, and his own father will tell him that he is a fool unless he embraces these opportunities. No man gets rich by farming alone, or by laboring at day’s wages at any mechanical occupation, whereas some men in trade and speculation amass great fortunes. That forty-nine out of every fifty finally fail and never get upon their feet again does not occur either to the youth or to his parents. Let us hope that some day it will, and that our young men will not be ashamed to earn their bread literally by the sweat of their brow. But the prospect at present for any such change seems exceedingly remote. Indeed, until the change occurs we will need all the skilled labor we can get from abroad. Unless the supply increases we will either have to give{357} up some of our country’s business schemes and prospects, or we will be obliged to offer a bounty or a premium to foreign laborers to come over here.

We especially need foreign farmers and workmen for the instruction of our own farmers, and a large immigration of foreign agriculturists, if they could be sprinkled among our agricultural communities in the various States, would do more than any proposed legislation to improve the condition of the American farmer. In his efforts to get beyond his strength and resources, efforts which are natural in all new countries, our farmer wastes enough to support another farmer. The Englishman, or Frenchman, or German, or Swede, can teach him how not to do this. There are a great many unprofitable farms near the city of New York, but when you see a small piece of ground tilled to the full extent of its capacity, and sending in large loads of fat vegetables to the city every day, you may safely bet that the proprietor is a foreigner. In one neighborhood very near New York city, a lot of discontented farmers are envious of the prosperity of one fellow who is tilling only thirteen acres, yet who has saved enough money to buy three houses in the city of New York, each of which yields him a handsome income. And who is this lucky fellow? A highly educated German, or a scientific English farmer? No; he is{358} a wretched Laplander, a man who is obliged to be ashamed of the province which gave him birth, and who poses among acquaintances as a Swede. He was a common farm laborer in his own country, and came here with very little more money than would pay his board at a den near the Battery for two or three days until some one should employ him. But he had learned how to turn every scrap of soil to the best advantage, how to make the most of all fertilizers, and how to get the largest number of crops out of a given amount of soil in a given time. During the agricultural depression of Great Britain a few years ago, which followed several successive wet years, a number of English farmers sold out at a sacrifice, came over here and located wherever best they could, and it is astonishing to see how fast some of these men have got along, and how well fixed they now are, as the saying is. They didn’t seem to be very smart fellows. In a horse-trade, or a shooting-match, or a political squabble, the best of them cannot hold his own for five minutes with an ordinary American. But when it comes to farming so as to make every resource of the estate count for all that it is worth, they leave the American farmer far behind.

Nevertheless, we need to restrict and regulate more systematically, and with more rigor than we ever did it before. Of course we have the{359} right to refuse absolutely undesirable immigrants. No one can deny this with any show of reason, and if we would fight to maintain this principle no nation could blame us. But we also have the right to deny citizenship to workmen coming from any portion of the world, until we are satisfied that they intend to become citizens, and that they will be desirable acquisitions. We are quite competent to keep up our own supply of idiots, and paupers and criminals. No nation has a monopoly of that sort of thing, and we do quite as well in that way as could be expected of us, and far better than suits our t............