Races and Immigrants in America

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(From The Home Missionary)

The Russian people, at that time, were confined to the interior surrounding Moscow, but even before the crusades they had expelled the Jews. As rapidly as they conquered territory to the south from Turkey, or to the west from Poland, they carried forward the same hostility. There was only one country, Poland, in the centre of Europe, where the kings, desiring to build up their cities, invited the Jews, and hither the persecuted race fled from the East before the Russians, and latterly from the West, driven out by the Germans. When finally, a hundred years ago, the remnant of the Polish Empire was divided between Russia, Prussia, and Austria, the Jewish population in this favored area had become the largest aggregation of that people since the destruction of Jerusalem. To-day in certain of these provinces belonging to Russia the Jews number as high as one-sixth of the entire population, and more than half of that of several cities. Fifteen provinces taken from Poland and Turkey, extending 1500 miles along the border of Germany and Austria-Hungary and 240 miles in width, constitute to-day the “Pale of Settlement,” the region where Jews are permitted to live. Here are found one-third of the world’s 11,000,000 Jews.[51] Here they formerly engaged in all lines of industry, including agriculture.

Now we come to the last great national uprising, like that which began in England six hundred years ago. The Russian serfs had been freed in 1861. But they were left without land or capital and were burdened by high rents and enormous taxes. The Jews became their merchants, middlemen, and usurers. Suddenly, in 1881, the peasants, oppressed and neglected by landlord and government, turned in their helplessness upon the intermediate cause of their misery, the Jew. The anti-Semitic riots of that year have perhaps never been exceeded in ferocity and indiscriminate destruction. Then began the migration to America. The next year the Russian government took up the persecution, and the notorious “May Orders” of 1882 were promulgated. These, at the instigation of the Greek Church, have been followed by orders more stringent, so that to-day, unless relieved by the terrorized promises of the Czar, the Jew is not permitted to foreclose a mortgage or to lease or purchase land; he cannot do business on Sundays or Christian holidays; he cannot hold office; he cannot worship or assemble without police permit; he must serve in the army, but cannot become an officer; he is excluded from schools and universities; he is fined for conducting manufactures and commerce; he is almost prohibited from the learned professions. While all other social questions are excluded from discussion, the anti-Semitic press is given free play, and the popular hatred of the Jew is stirred to frenzy by “yellow” journals. Only when this hatred breaks out in widespread riots does the news reach America, but the persecution is constant and relentless. The government and the army join with the peasants, for, true to the character of this versatile race, the Jews are leaders of the revolutionary and socialistic patriots who seek to overthrow the government and restore the land to the people.

Nor is this uprising confined to Russia. Galician Jews in the Austrian possessions of former Poland, where the Slavs bitterly complain of them as saloon-keepers and money-lenders,[52] have suffered the persecutions of their race, and in the last ten years Roumania, a country of peasants adjoining Hungary and Russia, has adopted laws and regulations even more oppressive than those of her neighbor.

Thus it is that this marvellous and paradoxical race, the parent of philosophers, artists, reformers, martyrs, and also of the shrewdest exploiters of the poor and ignorant, has, in two decades, come to America in far greater numbers than in the two centuries preceding.

It should not be inferred that the Jews are a race of pure descent. Coming as they do from all sections and nations of Europe, they are truly cosmopolitan, and have taken on the language, customs, and modes of thought of the people among whom they live. More than this, in the course of centuries, their physical characteristics have departed from those of their Semitic cousins in the East, and they have become assimilated in blood with their European neighbors. In Russia, especially in the early centuries, native tribes were converted to Judaism and mingled with their proselyters. That which makes the Jew a peculiar people is not altogether the purity of his blood, but persecution, devotion to his religion, and careful training of his children. Among the Jews from Eastern Europe there are marked intellectual and moral differences. The Hungarian Jew, who emigrated earliest, is adventurous and speculative: the Southern Russian keeps few of the religious observances, is the most intellectual and socialistic, and most inclined to the life of a wage-earner; the Western Russian is orthodox and emotional, saves money, becomes a contractor and retail merchant; the Galician Jew is the poorest, whose conditions at home were the harshest, and he begins American life as a pedler. That which unites them all as a single people is their religious training and common language.

The Hebrew language is read and written by all the men and half of the women, but is not spoken except by a few especially orthodox Jews on Saturday. Hebrew is the language of business and correspondence, Yiddish the language of conversation, just as Latin in the Middle Ages was the official and international language, while the various peoples spoke each its own vernacular. The Yiddish spoken by the Russian Jews in America is scarcely a language—it is a jargon without syntax, conjugation, or declension. Its basis is sixty per cent German of the sixteenth century, showing the main origin of the people, and forty per cent the language of the countries whence they come.

That which most of all has made the Jew a cause of alarm to the peasants of Eastern Europe is the highest mark of his virtue, namely, his rapid increase in numbers. A high birth-rate, a low death-rate, a long life, place the Jew as far above the average as the negro is below the average. These two races are the two extremes of American race vitality. Says Ripley:[53]—

“Suppose two groups of one hundred infants each, one Jewish, one of average American parentage (Massachusetts), to be born on the same day. In spite of the disparity of social conditions in favor of the latter, the chances, determined by statistical means, are that one-half of the Americans will die within forty-seven years; while the first half of the Jews will not succumb to disease or accident before the expiration of seventy-one years. The death-rate is really but little over half that of the average American population.”

While the negro exceeds all races in the constitutional diseases of consumption and pneumonia, the Jew excels all in immunity from these diseases. His vitality is ascribed to his sanitary meat inspection, his sobriety, temperance, and self-control. Of the Jew it might be said more truly than of any other European people that the growth of population has led to overcrowding and has induced emigration. Yet of no people is this less true, for, were it not for the discrimination and persecution directed against them, the Jews would be the most prosperous and least overcrowded of the races of Europe.

The Finns.—Until the year 1901 Finland was the freest and best governed part of the Russian Empire. Wrested from Sweden in 1809, it became a grand duchy of the Czar, guaranteed self-government, and confirmed by coronation oath of each successor. It was the only section of the Russian Empire with a constitutional government in which the laws, taxes, and army were controlled by a legislature representing the people. Here alone in all his empire was the Czar compelled to ask the consent of parliament in order to enact laws. But these free institutions within the past seven years were by his decree abrogated. The Czar claimed the right to put into force such laws as he chose without discussion or acceptance by the Finnish diet. The Russian language took the place of Swedish and Finnish as the official medium, a severe censorship of the press was introduced, the Lutheran religion, devoutly adhered to, was subordinated to the “orthodox,” the independent Finnish army was abolished and Finns were distributed throughout the armies of the empire, and a Russian governor with absolute powers was placed over all. Thus have 2,000,000 of the sturdiest specimens of humanity been suddenly reduced to the level of Asiatic despotism. They had managed by industry and thrift to extort a livelihood from a sterile soil, and had developed a school system with universal education, culminating in one of the noblest universities of Europe. Their peasants are healthy, intelligent, honest, and sober. In one year, 1900, their emigration increased from 6000 to 12,000, and it continues at 14,000, notwithstanding the repentance of the Czar and his restoration of their stolen rights. Compared with the population of the country, the present immigration from Finland is proportionately greater than that of any race except the Jews; and famine, adding its horrors to the loss of their liberties, has served to augment the army of exiles.

Slav                                 Jewish                             Polack                    Lithuanian
(From The Home Missionary)

Much dispute has arisen respecting the racial relations of the Finns. Their language is like that of the Magyars, an agglutinative tongue with tendencies towards inflections, but their physical structure allies them more nearly to the Teutons. Their Lutheran religion also separates them from other peoples of the Russian Empire. Their sober industriousness and high intelligence give them a place above that of their intolerant conquerors; and the futile attempts of the Slav to “Russify” them drove to America many of our most desirable immigrants.

The French Canadians.—When Canada was conquered by England in 1759, it contained a French population of 65,000. Without further immigration the number had increased in 1901 to 2,400,000, including 1,600,000 in Canada and 800,000 emigrants and their children in the United States. Scarcely another race has multiplied as rapidly, doubling every twenty-five years. The contrast with the same race in France, where population is actually declining, is most suggestive. French Canada is, as it were, a bit of mediæval France, picked out and preserved for the curious student of social evolution. No French revolution broke down its old institutions, and the English conquest changed little else than the oath of allegiance. Language, customs, laws, and property rights remained intact. The only state church in North America is the Roman Catholic Church of Quebec, with its great wealth, its control of education, and its right to levy tithes and other church dues. With a standard of living lower than that of the Irish or Italians, and a population increasing even more rapidly, the French from Canada for a time seemed destined to displace other races in the textile mills of New England. Yet they came only as sojourners, intending by the work of every member of the family to save enough money to return to Canada, purchase a farm, and live in relative affluence. Their migration began at the close of the Civil War, and during periods of prosperity they swarmed to the mill towns, while in periods of depression they returned to their Northern homes. Gradually an increasing proportion remained in “the States,” and the number in 1900 was 395,000 born in Canada, and 436,000 children born on this side of the line.

The Portuguese.—A diminutive but interesting migration of recent years is that of the Portuguese, who come, not from Portugal, but from the Cape Verde and Azores Islands, near equatorial Africa. These islands are remarkably overpopulated, and the emigration, nearly 9000 souls in 1906, is a very large proportion of the total number of inhabitants. By two methods did they find their way to America. One was almost accidental, for it was the wreck of a Portuguese vessel on the New England coast that first directed their attention to that section. They have settled mainly at New Bedford, Massachusetts, where they follow the fisheries in the summer and enter the mills in the winter. The other method was solicitation, which took several thousand of them to Hawaii as contract laborers on the sugar plantations. Unlike the Oriental importations to these islands the Portuguese insisted that their families be imported, and then as soon as their contracts expired they left the planters to become small farmers, and are now the backbone of the coffee industry. They and their children are nearly half of the “Caucasian” element of 30,000. In Massachusetts they are of two distinct types, the whites from the Azores and the blacks from the Cape Verde Islands, the latter plainly a blend of Portuguese and Africans. Their standards of living are similar to those of the Italians, though they are distinguished by their cleanliness and the neatness of their homes.

Syrians and Armenians.—That the recruiting area of American immigration is extending eastward is no more clearly evident than in the recent migration of Syrians and Armenians. These peoples belong to the Christian races of Asiatic Turkey, whence they are escaping the oppressions of a government which deserves the name of organized robbery rather than government. Within the past thirty years many thousand Syrians of Mount Lebanon have emigrated to Egypt and other Mediterranean countries, to the dependencies of Great Britain and South America. Six thousand of them came to the United States in 1906. They belong mainly to the Greek Church or the Maronite branch of the Roman Catholic Church, and it is mainly American missionary effort that has diverted them to the United States. Unlike other immigrants, they come principally from the towns, and are traders and pedlers. Broadly speaking, says an agent of the Charity Organization Society of New York, “the well-intentioned efforts of the missionaries have been abused by their protégés.... It is these alleged proselytes who have contributed largely to bring into relief the intrinsically servile character of the Syrian, his ingratitude and mendacity, his prostitution of all ideals to the huckster level.... As a rule they affiliate themselves with some Protestant church or mission, abandoning such connections when no longer deemed necessary or profitable.”[54]

The Armenian migration began with the monstrous Kurdish atrocities of recent years, instigated and supported by the Turkish government. Armenians are a primitive branch of the Christian religion, and at an early date became separated from both the Greek and Roman churches. They are among the shrewdest of merchants, traders, and money-lenders of the Orient, and, like the Jews, are hated by the peasantry and persecuted by the government. Like the Jews also, religious persecution has united them to the number of five million in a racial type of remarkable purity and distinctness from the surrounding races.

Asiatic Immigration.—Utterly distinct from all other immigrants in the nineteenth century are the Chinese. Coming from a civilization already ancient when Europe was barbarian, the Chinaman complacently refuses to assimilate with Americans, and the latter reciprocate by denying him the right of citizenship. His residence is temporary, he comes without his family, and he accumulates what to him is a fortune for his declining years in China. The gold discoveries of California first attracted him, and the largest migration was 40,000 in 1882, the year when Congress prohibited further incoming. In 1906, 3015 Chinamen tried to get in, and 2732 were admitted, mainly as United States citizens, returning merchants and returning laborers. One-half of the 1448 admitted as “exempt” were believed by the immigration officials to have been coolies in disguise.[55] Within the past ten years the Japanese have taken his place, and 14,000 of his Mongolian cousins arrived in 1906.

The immigration of the Japanese has taken a peculiar turn owing to the annexation of Hawaii. While these islands were yet a kingdom in 1868 this immigration began, and in 1886 a treaty was concluded with Japan for the immigration of Japanese contract laborers for the benefit of the sugar planters. Many thousand were imported under this arrangement, and “the fear that the islands would be annexed to Japan was one of the prime factors in the demand for annexation to the United States.”[56] With annexation in 1900 contract labor was abolished, and the Japanese, freed from servitude, indulged in “an epidemic of strikes.” The Japanese government retained paternal oversight of its laborers migrating to foreign lands, which is done through some thirty-four emigrant companies chartered by the government. Since opening up Korea for settlement Japan has granted but a limited number of passports to its citizens destined for the mainland of America, so that almost the entire immigration comes first to Honolulu through arrangements made between the emigrant companies and the planters. But the planters are not able to keep them on the island on account of the higher wages on the Pacific coast. Since the alien contract-labor law does not apply to immigrants from Hawaii, a padroni system has sprung up for importing Japanese from that island. As a result, the arrivals at Honolulu are equalled by the departures to the mainland, and Hawaii becomes the American side entrance for the Japanese.[57] This evasion has been stopped by the law of February 20, 1906.

Hawaii also is showing another Asiatic race the opening to America. The growing independence of the Japanese led the planters to seek Koreans, since the Chinese exclusion law came into force with annexation. In this effort to break down Japanese solidarity some eight thousand Koreans have been mixed with them during the past five years, and these also have begun the transit to California.

Although the Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans are the familiar examples often cited of low standards of living, yet their wages in their native countries are higher than those of the South Italians and equal to those of the Slavs. They earn $4 or $5 a month and spend $2 or $3 for living. In Hawaii they get $18 to $20 a month, and on the Pacific coast $35 to $50.

In the past two or three years a tiny dripping of immigration has found its way from another vast empire of Asiatic population—India. Some two hundred are admitted each year. The populations of that land are growing discontented as they see Indians returned from Natal, where they earned $20 to $35 a month, while at home they get only $3 to $7 under a penal contract system. The American consul at Calcutta reports ten sturdy Punjab Mohammedans inquiring the way to America and telling of their friends at work on American dairy farms. In his judgment they are stronger and more intelligent than the Chinese coolies and are preferable for work on the Panama Canal. The self-governing British colonies have educational restrictions designed to prevent Asiatic immigration, whether of British subjects or aliens;[58] other colonies have contract labor. The unrest of India therefore turns the native eyes towards America.

While America has been welcoming the eastward and backward races she has begun to lose her colonial stock and her Americanized Teutonic stock. These pioneer elements have kept in front of the westward movement, and now that the American frontier is gone they seek a new frontier in Canada. The Canadian government for several years has sought to fill its vast Western plains with Teutonic races and to discourage others. It has expended many thousand dollars for advertising and soliciting in the British Isles, and has maintained twenty to thirty immigration agents in our Western states. The opportunities of British Columbia are now well known, and the American farmers, with agricultural land rising enormously in value, sell out to the newcomer or the acclimated immigrant and betake themselves to double or treble the area for cultivation under the flag of England. They push onward by rail and by wagon, and the ingress of millions of immigrants is reflected in the egress of thousands of Americans.[59]

Indigenous Races.—It is not enough that we have opened our gates to the millions of divergent races in Europe, Asia, and Africa; we have in these latter days admitted to our fold new types by another process—annexation.

The Hawaiians are the latest of these oversea races to be brought under our flag, although in the course of eighty years they have been brought under our people. Nowhere else in the world has been seen such finished effect on an aboriginal race of the paradoxes of Western civilization—Christianity, private property, and sexual disease. With a population of some 300,000 at the time of discovery they had dwindled by domestic wars and imported disease to 140,000 when the missionaries came in 1820, then to 70,000 in 1850 when private property began its hunt for cheap labor, and now they number but 30,000. A disease eliminating the unfit of a race protected by monogamy decimates this primitive people on a lower stage of morals. Missionaries from the most intellectual type of American Protestantism converted the diminishing nation to Christianity in fifty years. A soil and climate the most favorable in the world for sugar-cane inspired American planters and sons of missionaries to displace the unsteady Hawaiians with industrious coolies, and finally to overthrow the government they had undermined and then annex it to America. Although acquiring American citizenship and sharing equally the suffrage with Caucasians, the decreasing influence of the Hawaiians is further diminished by the territorial form of government.

The Spanish War added islands on opposite sides of the globe, with races resulting from diametrically opposite effects of three centuries of Spanish rule. From Porto Rico the aboriginal Carib had long disappeared under the slavery of his conquerors, and his place had been filled by the negro slave in sugar cultivation and by the Spaniard and other Europeans in coffee cultivation. To-day the negro and mulatto are two-fifths of the million population and the whites three-fifths.[60] In the Philippine Islands the native races have survived under a theocratic protectorate and even their tribal and racial subdivisions have been preserved. Two-fifths of their population of 7,600,000 belong to the leading tribe, the Visayans, and one-fifth to another, the Tagalogs. Six other tribes complete the list of “civilized” or Christianized peoples, while 10 per cent remain pagan in the mountains and forests. Four-fifths of the population are illiterate, a proportion the same as in Porto Rico, compared with less than half of the negroes and only one-sixteenth of the whites in the United States.[61]

CHAPTER V

In preceding chapters we have seen the conditions in their foreign homes which spurred the emigrants to seek America. We have seen religious persecution, race oppression, political revolution, militarism, taxation, famine, and poverty conspiring to press upon the unprivileged masses and to drive the more adventurous across the water. But it would be a mistake should we stop at that point and look upon the migration of these dissatisfied elements as only a voluntary movement to better their condition. In fact, had it been left to the initiative of the emigrants the flow of immigration to America could scarcely ever have reached one-half its actual dimensions. While various motives and inducements have always worked together, and it would be rash to assert dogmatically the relative weight of each, yet to one who has carefully noted all the circumstances it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that even more important than the initiative of immigrants have been the efforts of Americans and ship-owners to bring and attract them. Throughout our history these efforts have been inspired by one grand, effective motive,—that of making a profit upon the immigrants. The desire to get cheap labor, to take in passenger fares, and to sell land have probably brought more immigrants than the hard conditions of Europe, Asia, and Africa have sent. Induced immigration has been as potent as voluntary immigration. And it is to this mercenary motive that we owe our manifold variety of races, and especially our influx of backward races. One entire race, the negro, came solely for the profit of ship-owners and landowners. Working people of the colonial period were hoodwinked and kidnapped by shippers and speculators who reimbursed themselves by indenturing them to planters and farmers. The beginners of other races have come through similar but less coercive inducements, initiated, however, by the demand of those who held American property for speculation or investment. William Penn and his lessees, John Law, the Dutch East India Company, and many of the grantees of lands in the colonies, sent their agents through Western Europe and the British Isles with glowing advertisements, advanced transportation, and contracts for indentured service by way of reimbursement. In the nineteenth century new forms of induced migration appeared. Victims of the Irish famine were assisted to emigrate by local and general governments and by philanthropic societies, and both the Irish and the Germans, whose migration began towards the middle of the century, were, in a measure, exceptions to the general rule of induced immigration for profit. Several Western states created immigration bureaus which advertised their own advantages for intending immigrants, and Wisconsin, especially, in this way settled her lands with a wide variety of races. After the Civil War, induced migration entered upon a vigorous revival. The system of indenturing had long since disappeared, because legislatures and courts declined to recognize and enforce contracts for service. Consequently a new form of importation appeared under the direction of middlemen of the same nativity as that of the immigrant. Chinese coolies came under contract with the Six Companies, who advanced their expenses and looked to their own secret agents and tribunals to enforce repayment with profit.[62] Japanese coolies, much later, came under contract with immigration companies chartered by the Japanese government.[63] Italians were recruited by the padroni, and the bulk of the new Slav immigration from Southeastern Europe is in charge of their own countrymen acting as drummers and middlemen.

INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS OF IMMIGRANTS—1906[64]

These labor speculators have perfected a system of inducements and through billing as effective as that by which horse and cattle buyers in Kentucky or Iowa collect and forward their living freight to the markets of Europe. A Croatian of the earlier immigration, for example, sets up a saloon in South Chicago and becomes an employment bureau for his “greener” countrymen, and also ticket agent on commission for the steamship companies. His confederates are stationed along the entire route at connecting points, from the villages of Croatia to the saloon in Chicago. In Croatia they go among the laborers and picture to them the high wages and abundant work in America. They induce them to sell their little belongings and they furnish them with through tickets. They collect them in companies, give them a countersign, and send them on to their fellow-agent at Fiume, thence to Genoa or other port whence the American steerage vessel sails. In New York they are met by other confederates, whom they identify by their countersign, and again they are safely transferred and shipped to their destination. Here they are met by their enterprising countryman, lodged and fed, and within a day or two handed over to the foreman in a great steel plant, or to the “boss” of a construction gang on a railway, or to a contractor on a large public improvement. After they have earned and saved a little money they send for their friends, to whom the “boss” has promised jobs. Again their lodging-house countryman sells them the steamship ticket and arranges for the safe delivery of those for whom they have sent. In this way immigration is stimulated, and new races are induced to begin their American colonization. Eventually the pioneers send for their families, and it is estimated that nearly two-thirds of the immigrants in recent years have come on prepaid tickets or on money sent to them from America.[67]

The significance of this new and highly perfected form of inducement will appear when we look back for a moment upon the legislation governing immigration.

Immigration Legislation.—At the close of the Civil War, with a vast territory newly opened to the West by the railroads, Congress enacted a law throwing wide open our doors to the immigrants of all lands. It gave new guaranties for the protection of naturalized citizens in renouncing allegiance to their native countries, declaring that “expatriation is a natural and inherent right of all people, indispensable to the enjoyment of the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”[68]

In the same year, 1868, the famous Burlingame treaty was negotiated with China, by which Americans in China and Chinese in America should enjoy all the privileges, immunities, and exemptions enjoyed by citizens of the most favored nation. These steps favorable to immigration were in line with the long-continued policy of the country from the earliest colonial times.

But a new force had come into American politics—the wage-earner. From this time forth the old policies were violently challenged. High wages were to be pitted against high profits. The cheap labor which was eagerly sought by the corporations and large property owners was just as eagerly fought by the unpropertied wage-earners. Of course neither party conceded that it was selfishly seeking its own interest. Those who expected profits contended that cheap foreign labor was necessary for the development of the country; that American natural resources were unbounded, but American workmen could not be found for the rough work needed to turn these resources into wealth; that America should be in the future, as it had been in the past, a haven for the oppressed of all lands; and that in no better way could the principles of American democracy be spread to all peoples of the earth than by welcoming them and teaching them in our midst.

The wage-earners have not been so fortunate in their protestations of disinterestedness. They were compelled to admit that though they themselves had been immigrants or the children of immigrants, they were now denying to others what had been a blessing to them. Yet they were able to set forward one supreme argument which our race problems are every day more and more showing to be sound. The future of American democracy is the future of the American wage-earner. To have an enlightened and patriotic citizenship we must protect the wages and standard of living of those who constitute the bulk of the citizens. This argument had been offered by employers themselves when they were seeking a protective tariff against the importation of “pauper-made” goods. What wonder that the wage-earner should use the same argument to keep out the pauper himself, and especially that he should begin by applying the argument to those races which showed themselves unable rapidly to assimilate, and thereby make a stand for high wages and high standards of living. Certain it is that had the white wage-earners possessed the suffrage and political influence during colonial times, the negro would not have been admitted in large numbers, and we should have been spared that race problem which of all is the largest and most nearly insoluble.

For it must be observed in general that race antagonism occurs on the same competitive level. What appear often to be religious, political, and social animosities are economic at bottom, and the substance of the economic struggle is the advantage which third parties get when competitors hold each other down. The Southern planter was not hostile to the negro slave—he was his friend and protector. His nurse was the negro “mammy,” his playmates were her children, and the mulatto throws light on his views of equality. It was the poor white who hated the negro and fled from his presence to the hills and the frontier, or sank below his level, despised by white and black. In times of freedom and reconstruction it is not the great landowner or employer that leads in the exhibition of race hostility, but the small farmer or wage-earner.[69] The one derives a profit from the presence of the negro—the other loses his job or his farm. With the progress of white democracy in place of the old aristocracy, as seen in South Carolina, hostility to the negro may be expected to increase. With the elimination of the white laborer, as seen in the black counties, the relations of negro and planter are harmonious.[70]

So it is in the North. The negro or immigrant strike breaker is befriended by the employer, but hated by the employee. The Chinaman or Japanese in Hawaii or California is praised and sought after by the employer and householder, but dreaded by the wage-earner and domestic. Investors and landowners see their properties rise in value by the competition of races, but the competitors see their wages and jobs diminish. The increase of wealth intensifies the difference and raises up professional classes to the standpoint of the capitalists. With both of them the privilege of leisure depends on the presence of servants, but the wage-earners do their own work. As the immigrant rises in the scale, the small farmer, contractor, or merchant feels his competition and begins to join in measures of race protection.

This hostility is not primarily racial in character. It is the competitive struggle for standards of living. It appears to be racial because for the most part races have different standards. But where different races agree on their standards the racial struggle ceases, and the negro, Italian, Slav, and American join together in the class struggle of a trade-union. On the other hand, if the same race has different standards, the economic struggle breaks down even the strongest affinities of race. The Russian Jew in the sweat-shop turns against the immigrant Jew, fleeing from the very persecution that he himself has escaped, and taking his place in the employment of the capitalist German Jew.[71] It is an easy and patriotic matter for the lawyer, minister, professor, employer, or investor, placed above the arena of competition, to proclaim the equal right of all races to American opportunities; to avow his own willingness to give way should even a better Chinaman, Hindu, or Turk come in to take his place; and to rebuke the racial hatred of those who resist this displacement. His patriotism and world-wide brotherhood cost him and his family nothing, and indeed they add to his profits and leisure. Could he realize his industrial position, and picture in imagination that of his fellow-citizens, their attitude would not appear less disinterested than his own. The immigrant comes as a wage-earner, and the American wage-earner bears the initial cost of his Americanization. Before he acquired the suffrage his protest was unheard—after he gained political power he began to protect himself.

The first outbreak of the new-found strength of the American wage-earner was directed against a race superior even to the negro immigrants in industry, frugality, intelligence, and civilization—the Chinese. And this outbreak was so powerful that, in spite of all appeals to the traditions and liberties of America, the national government felt driven to repudiate the treaty so recently signed with the highest manifestations of faith, good-will, and international comity.

Very early in the settlement of California the Chinaman had encountered hostile legislation. The state election had been carried by the Knownothings as early as 1854. Discriminating taxes, ordinances, and laws were adopted, and even immigration was regulated by the state legislature. But the state and federal courts declared such legislation invalid as violating treaties or interfering with international relations. Then the wage-earning element of California joined as one man in demanding action by the federal government, and eventually, by the treaty of 1880 and the law of 1888, Chinese laborers were excluded.[72] Thus did the Caucasian wage-earner score his first and signal victory in reversing what his opponents proclaimed were “principles coeval with the foundation of our government.”

The next step was the Alien Contract Labor law of 1885 and 1888, placed on the statute books through the efforts of the Knights of Labor and the trades-unions. As early as 1875 Congress had prohibited the immigration of paupers, criminal, and immoral persons, but the law of 1885 went to the other extreme and was designed to exclude industrial classes. The law is directed against prepayment of transportation, assistance, or encouragement of foreigners to immigrate under contract to perform labor in the United States, and provides for the prosecution of the importer and deportation of the contract immigrant. This law has been enforced against skilled labor, which comes mainly from northwestern Europe, but, owing to the new system of padroni and middlemen above described, it cannot be enforced against the unskilled laborers of Southern and Eastern Europe, since it cannot be shown that they have come under contract to perform labor. By the amendment and revised law adopted in 1903, after considerable discussion, and an effort on the part of the labor unions to strengthen the law, it was extended so as to exclude not only those coming under contract but also those coming under offers and promises of employment.[73]

From what precedes we see that there are two exactly opposite points of view from which the subject of immigration is approached. One is the production of wealth; the other is the distribution of wealth. He who takes the standpoint of production sees the enormous undeveloped resources of this country—the mines to be exploited, railroads and highways to be built and rebuilt, farms to be opened up or to be more intensively cultivated, manufactures to be multiplied, and the markets of the world to be conquered by our exports, while there are not enough workmen, or not enough willing to do the hard and disagreeable work at the bottom.

He who takes the standpoint of distribution sees the huge fortunes, the low wages, the small share of the product going to labor, the sweat-shop, the slums, all on account of the excessive competition of wage-earner against wage-earner.

Consider first the bearing of immigration on the production of wealth.