Races and Immigrants in America
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Title: Races and Immigrants in America
Author: John R. Commons
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RACES AND IMMIGRANTS IN AMERICA
[Illustration: ELLIS ISLAND, IMMIGRATION STATION]
RACES AND IMMIGRANTS IN AMERICA
BY JOHN R. COMMONS
PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL ECONOMY, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.
1907
_All rights reserved_
COPYRIGHT, 1907,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published May, 1907.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
CONTENTS
PAGE
REFERENCES vii
CHAPTER
I. RACE AND DEMOCRACY 1
II. COLONIAL RACE ELEMENTS 22
III. THE NEGRO 39
IV. NINETEENTH CENTURY ADDITIONS 63
V. INDUSTRY 107
VI. LABOR 135
VII. CITY LIFE, CRIME, AND POVERTY 160
VIII. POLITICS 179
IX. AMALGAMATION AND ASSIMILATION 198
INDEX 239
ILLUSTRATIONS
ELLIS ISLAND, IMMIGRANT STATION _Frontispiece_
PAGE
"RETURN OF THE MAYFLOWER." Painting By Boughton, 1834 _opposite_ 24
ANGLO-SAXON MOUNTAINEERS, BEREA COLLEGE, KENTUCKY _opposite_ 36
COUNTIES HAVING A LARGER PROPORTION OF NEGROES IN 1900
THAN IN 1880 _opposite_ 50
MOVEMENT OF IMMIGRANTS, IMPORTS OF MERCHANDISE PER
CAPITA AND IMMIGRANTS PER 10,000 POPULATION _between_ 63-64
ALIENS AWAITING ADMISSION AT ELLIS ISLAND _opposite_ 78
NORWEGIAN, ITALIAN, AND ARABIC TYPES " 90
SLAV, JEWISH, POLACK, AND LITHUANIAN TYPES " 96
INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS OF IMMIGRANTS--1906 _between_ 108-109
AMERICAN SCHOOL BOYS _opposite_ 122
FILIPINO GOVERNORS " 142
GOVERNOR JOHNSON OF MINNESOTA.--SWEDE " 154
DR. ORONHYATEKHA, MOHAWK INDIAN. LATE CHIEF OF
ORDER OF FORESTERS " 168
CHINESE STUDENTS, HONOLULU " 186
FACULTY OF TUSKEGEE INSTITUTE " 202
SLAVIC HOME MISSIONARIES " 216
ALIENS AWAITING ADMISSION AT ELLIS ISLAND " 230
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No. 2. "Social and Physical Condition of Negroes in Cities" (1897).
No. 3. "Some Efforts of Negroes for Social Betterment" (1898).
No. 6. "The Negro Common School" (1901).
No. 7. "The Negro Artisan" (1902).
No. 8. "The Negro Church" (1903).
No. 9. "Notes on Negro Crime" (1904).
No. 10. "A Select Bibliography of the Negro American" (1905).
BALCH, EMILY GREENE, "Slav Emigration at its Source," _Charities_, 1906.
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7; "Galicia, Austrian Poles, Ruthenians," May 5.
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by author and wife through southern Italy and Sicily and return by
steerage with immigrants.
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35:238; "The Spanish in America," 35:294.
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Lynching in the United States_. New York, 1905.
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1903.
DU BOIS, W. E. B., _The Philadelphia Negro_. Philadelphia, 1899; _The
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_Supplementary Analysis_, pp. 185-275; "The Negro Farmer," pp. 511-579.
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EMIGRATION TO THE UNITED STATES, Special Consular Reports, Vol. XXX.
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_Facts about Immigration._ Reports of Conferences of the Immigration
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New York, 1907.
_Federation._ Quarterly Journal of Federation of Churches and Christian
Organizations, New York. Especially June, July, December, 1902, March,
June, October, 1903. Also annual reports and sociological canvasses of
the Federation.
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1897.
FRANKLIN, F. J., _The Legislative History of Naturalization in the
United States_. Chicago, 1906.
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(1903); 3d Report, _Bulletin_ No. 66 (1906).
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Negro," _Publications of the American Economic Association_, Vol. XI,
Nos. 1, 2, 3 (1896).
HUEBNER, GROVER G., "The Americanization of the Immigrant," _American
Academy of Political and Social Science_, May, 1906, p. 191.
_Hull House Maps and Papers, A Presentation of Nationalities and Wages
in a Congested District of Chicago_, by residents of Hull House. New
York, 1895.
HUNTER, ROBERT, _Poverty_. New York, 1904. Chapter VI, "The Immigrant."
_Immigration Laws and Regulations and Chinese Exclusion Laws_, Bureau of
Immigration and Naturalization, Washington.
IMMIGRATION RESTRICTION LEAGUE, Prescott F. Hall, Secretary, Boston,
Mass. Leaflets.
INDUSTRIAL COMMISSION, Vol. XV, _Immigration and Education_; Vol. XIX,
_Miscellaneous_ (1901).
JACKSON, HELEN HUNT, _A Century of Dishonor_. New York, 1881.
JAPANESE AND KOREAN EXCLUSION LEAGUE, San Francisco. Leaflets.
JENKS, J. W., _Certain Economic Questions in the English and Dutch
Colonies in the Orient_. War Department, Bureau of Insular Affairs,
1902, Doc. No. 168.
JEWISH AGRICULTURAL AND INDUSTRIAL AID SOCIETY, _Annual Reports_. New
York.
KELLOR, FRANCES A., _Out of Work_. New York, 1904.
KELSEY, CARL, _The Negro Farmer_. Chicago, 1903. Also _Annals of the
American Academy of Political and Social Science_, January, 1903.
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in Massachusetts," _Quarterly Journal of Economics_, November, 1901,
February, 1902. "Die Einwanderungspolitik und die Bevoelkerungsfrage der
Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika," _Volkswirthschaftliche Zeitfragen_.
Berlin, 1903.
LAZARE, BERNARD, _Antisemitism, Its History and Causes_. New York, 1903.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, _Select List of References on the Negro Question
(1903). List of Works relating to the Germans in the United States
(1904). Select List of References on Chinese Immigration (1904).
Fourteenth Amendment_. List of Discussions of Fourteenth and Fifteenth
Amendments with Special Reference to Negro Suffrage (1906). _List of
References on Naturalization (1907)._
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LORD, TRENOR, AND BARROWS, _The Italian in America_. New York, 1905.
Especially Italians in American agriculture.
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RACES AND IMMIGRANTS IN AMERICA
CHAPTER I
RACE AND DEMOCRACY
"All men are created equal." So wrote Thomas Jefferson, and so agreed
with him the delegates from the American colonies. But we must not press
them too closely nor insist on the literal interpretation of their
words. They were not publishing a scientific treatise on human nature
nor describing the physical, intellectual, and moral qualities of
different races and different individuals, but they were bent upon a
practical object in politics. They desired to sustain before the world
the cause of independence by such appeals as they thought would have
effect; and certainly the appeal to the sense of equal rights before God
and the law is the most powerful that can be addressed to the masses of
any people. This is the very essence of American democracy, that one man
should have just as large opportunity as any other to make the most of
himself, to come forward and achieve high standing in any calling to
which he is inclined. To do this the bars of privilege have one by one
been thrown down, the suffrage has been extended to every man, and
public office has been opened to any one who can persuade his
fellow-voters or their representatives to select him.
But there is another side to the successful operations of democracy. It
is not enough that equal opportunity to participate in making and
enforcing the laws should be vouchsafed to all--it is equally important
that all should be capable of such participation. The individuals, or
the classes, or the races, who through any mental or moral defect are
unable to assert themselves beside other individuals, classes, or races,
and to enforce their right to an equal voice in determining the laws and
conditions which govern all, are just as much deprived of the privilege
as though they were excluded by the constitution. In the case of
individuals, when they sink below the level of joint participation, we
recognize them as belonging to a defective or criminal or pauper class,
and we provide for them, not on the basis of their rights, but on the
basis of charity or punishment. Such classes are exceptions in point of
numbers, and we do not feel that their non-participation is a flaw in
the operations of democratic government. But when a social class or an
entire race is unable to command that share in conducting government to
which the laws entitle it, we recognize at once that democracy as a
practical institution has in so far broken down, and that, under the
forms of democracy, there has developed a class oligarchy or a race
oligarchy.
Two things, therefore, are necessary for a democratic government such as
that which the American people have set before themselves: equal
opportunities before the law, and equal ability of classes and races to
use those opportunities. If the first is lacking, we have legal
oligarchy; if the second is lacking, we have actual oligarchy disguised
as democracy.
Now it must be observed that, compared with the first two centuries of
our nation's history, the present generation is somewhat shifting its
ground regarding democracy. While it can never rightly be charged that
our fathers overlooked the inequalities of races and individuals, yet
more than the present generation did they regard with hopefulness the
educational value of democracy. "True enough," they said, "the black man
is not equal to the white man, but once free him from his legal bonds,
open up the schools, the professions, the businesses, and the offices to
those of his number who are most aspiring, and you will find that, as a
race, he will advance favorably in comparison with his white
fellow-citizens."
It is now nearly forty years since these opportunities and educational
advantages were given to the negro, not only on equal terms, but
actually on terms of preference over the whites, and the fearful
collapse of the experiment is recognized even by its partisans as
something that was inevitable in the nature of the race at that stage
of its development. We shall have reason in the following pages to enter
more fully into this discussion, because the race question in America
has found its most intense expression in the relations between the white
and the negro races, and has there shown itself to be the most
fundamental of all American social and political problems. For it was
this race question that precipitated the Civil War, with the ominous
problems that have followed upon that catastrophe; and it is this same
race problem that now diverts attention from the treatment of those
pressing economic problems of taxation, corporations, trusts, and labor
organizations which themselves originated in the Civil War. The race
problem in the South is only one extreme of the same problem in the
great cities of the North, where popular government, as our forefathers
conceived it, has been displaced by one-man power, and where a profound
distrust of democracy is taking hold upon the educated and
property-holding classes who fashion public opinion.
This changing attitude toward the educational value of self-government
has induced a more serious study of the nature of democratic
institutions and of the classes and races which are called upon to share
in them. As a people whose earlier hopes have been shocked by the hard
blows of experience, we are beginning to pause and take invoice of the
heterogeneous stocks of humanity that we have admitted to the management
of our great political enterprise. We are trying to look beneath the
surface and to inquire whether there are not factors of heredity and
race more fundamental than those of education and environment. We find
that our democratic theories and forms of government were fashioned by
but one of the many races and peoples which have come within their
practical operation, and that that race, the so-called Anglo-Saxon,
developed them out of its own insular experience unhampered by inroads
of alien stock. When once thus established in England and further
developed in America we find that other races and peoples, accustomed to
despotism and even savagery, and wholly unused to self-government, have
been thrust into the delicate fabric. Like a practical people as we
pride ourselves, we have begun actually to despotize our institutions in
order to control these dissident elements, though still optimistically
holding that we retain the original democracy. The earlier problem was
mainly a political one--how to unite into one self-governing nation a
scattered population with the wide diversity of natural resources,
climates, and interests that mark a country soon to stretch from ocean
to ocean and from the arctics to the subtropics. The problem now is a
social one,--how to unite into one people a congeries of races even more
diverse than the resources and climates from which they draw their
subsistence. That motto, "_E pluribus unum_," which in the past has
guided those who through constitutional debate and civil war worked out
our form of government, must now again be the motto of those who would
work out the more fundamental problem of divergent races. Here is
something deeper than the form of government--it is the essence of
government--for it is that union of the hearts and lives and abilities
of the people which makes government what it really is.
The conditions necessary for democratic government are not merely the
constitutions and laws which guarantee equality, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness, for these after all are but paper documents. They
are not merely freedom from foreign power, for the Australian colonies
enjoy the most democratic of all governments, largely because they are
owned by another country which has protected them from foreign and civil
wars. Neither are wealth and prosperity necessary for democracy, for
these may tend to luxury, inequality, and envy. World power, however
glorious and enticing, is not helpful to democracy, for it inclines to
militarism and centralization, as did Rome in the hands of an emperor,
or Venice in the hands of an oligarchy. The true foundations of
democracy are in the character of the people themselves, that is, of the
individuals who constitute the democracy. These are: first,
intelligence--the power to weigh evidence and draw sound conclusions,
based on adequate information; second, manliness, that which the Romans
called virility, and which at bottom is dignified self-respect,
self-control, and that self-assertion and jealousy of encroachment
which marks those who, knowing their rights, dare maintain them; third,
and equally important, the capacity for cooperation, that willingness
and ability to organize, to trust their leaders, to work together for a
common interest and toward a common destiny, a capacity which we
variously designate as patriotism, public spirit, or self-government.
These are the basic qualities which underlie democracy,--intelligence,
manliness, cooperation. If they are lacking, democracy is futile. Here
is the problem of races, the fundamental division of mankind. Race
differences are established in the very blood and physical constitution.
They are most difficult to eradicate, and they yield only to the slow
processes of the centuries. Races may change their religions, their
forms of government, their modes of industry, and their languages, but
underneath all these changes they may continue the physical, mental, and
moral capacities and incapacities which determine the real character of
their religion, government, industry, and literature. Race and heredity
furnish the raw material, education and environment furnish the tools,
with which and by which social institutions are fashioned; and in a
democracy race and heredity are the more decisive, because the very
education and environment which fashion the oncoming generations are
themselves controlled through universal suffrage by the races whom it is
hoped to educate and elevate.
=Social Classes.=--Closely connected with race division in its effect upon
democracy are the divisions between social classes. In America we are
wont to congratulate ourselves on the absence of classes with their
accompanying hatred and envy. Whether we shall continue thus to commend
ourselves depends partly on what we mean by social classes. If we
compare our situation with an extreme case, that of India,[1] where
social classes have been hardened into rigid castes, we can see the
connection between races and classes. For it is generally held that the
castes of India originated in the conquests by an Aryan race of an
indigenous dark or colored race. And while the clear-cut race
distinctions have been blended through many centuries of amalgamation,
yet it is most apparent that a gradation in the color of the skin
follows the gradation in social position, from the light-colored,
high-caste Brahman to the dark-colored, low-caste Sudra, or outcast
pariah. Race divisions have been forgotten, but in their place religion
has sanctified a division even more rigid than that of race, for it is
sacrilege and defiance of the gods when a man of low caste ventures into
the occupation and calling of the high caste. India's condition now is
what might be conceived for our Southern states a thousand years from
now, when the black man who had not advanced to the lighter shades of
mulatto should be excluded from all professions and skilled trades and
from all public offices, and should be restricted to the coarsest kind
of service as a day laborer or as a field hand on the agricultural
plantations. Confined to this limited occupation, with no incentive to
economize because of no prospect to rise above his station, and with his
numbers increasing, competition would reduce his wages to the lowest
limit consistent with the continuance of his kind. Such a development is
plainly going on at the present day, and we may feel reasonably certain
that we can see in our own South the very historical steps by which in
the forgotten centuries India proceeded to her rigid system of castes.
There is lacking but one essential to the Indian system; namely, a
religion which ascribes to God himself the inequalities contrived by
man. For the Indian derives the sacred Brahman from the mouth of God, to
be His spokesman on earth, while the poor Sudra comes from the feet of
God, to be forever the servant of all the castes above him. But the
Christian religion has set forth a different theory, which ascribes to
God entire impartiality toward races and individuals. He has "made of
one blood all nations." It is out of this doctrine that the so-called
"self-evident" assertion in the Declaration of Independence originated,
and it is this doctrine which throughout the history of European
civilization has contributed to smoothen out the harsh lines of caste
into the less definite lines of social classes. For it must be
remembered that Europe, like India, is built upon conquest, and the
earlier populations were reduced to the condition of slaves and serfs to
the conquering races. True, there was not the extreme opposition of
white and colored races which distinguished the conquests of India, and
this is also one of the reasons why slavery and serfdom gradually gave
way and races coalesced. Nevertheless, the peasantry of Europe to-day is
in large part the product of serfdom and of that race-subjection which
produced serfdom. Herein we may find the source of that arrogance on the
one hand and subserviency on the other, which so closely relate class
divisions to race divisions. The European peasant, says Professor
Shaler,[2] "knows himself to be by birthright a member of an inferior
class, from which there is practically no chance of escaping.... It is
characteristic of peasants that they have accepted this inferior lot.
For generations they have regarded themselves as separated from their
fellow-citizens of higher estate. They have no large sense of citizenly
motives; they feel no sense of responsibility for any part of the public
life save that which lies within their own narrow round of action."
How different from the qualities of the typical American citizen whose
forefathers have erected our edifice of representative democracy! It was
not the peasant class of Europe that sought these shores in order to
found a free government. It was the middle class, the merchants and
yeomen, those who in religion and politics were literally "protestants,"
and who possessed the intelligence, manliness, and public spirit which
urged them to assert for themselves those inalienable rights which the
church or the state of their time had arrogated to itself. With such a
social class democracy is the only acceptable form of government. They
demand and secure equal opportunities because they are able to rise to
those opportunities. By their own inherent nature they look forward to
and aspire to the highest positions.
But the peasants of Europe, especially of Southern and Eastern Europe,
have been reduced to the qualities similar to those of an inferior race
that favor despotism and oligarchy rather than democracy. Their only
avenues of escape from their subordinate positions have been through the
army and the church, and these two institutions have drawn from the
peasants their ablest and brightest intellects into a life which
deprived them of offspring. "Among the prosperous folk there have been
ever many classes of occupations tempting the abler youths, while among
the laborers the church has afforded the easiest way to rise, and that
which is most tempting to the intelligent. The result has been, that
while the priesthood and monastic orders have systematically debilitated
all the populations of Catholic Europe, their influence has been most
efficient in destroying talent in the peasant class."[3]
Thus it is that the peasants of Catholic Europe, who constitute the bulk
of our immigration of the past thirty years, have become almost a
distinct race, drained of those superior qualities which are the
foundation of democratic institutions. If in America our boasted freedom
from the evils of social classes fails to be vindicated in the future,
the reasons will be found in the immigration of races and classes
incompetent to share in our democratic opportunities. Already in the
case of the negro this division has hardened and seems destined to
become more rigid. Therein we must admit at least one exception to our
claim of immunity from social classes. Whether with our public schools,
our stirring politics, our ubiquitous newspapers, our common language,
and our network of transportation, the children of the European
immigrant shall be able to rise to the opportunities unreached by his
parents is the largest and deepest problem now pressing upon us. It
behooves us as a people to enter into the practical study of this
problem, for upon its outcome depends the fate of government of the
people, for the people, and by the people.
=Races in the United States.=--We use the term "race" in a rather loose
and elastic sense; and indeed we are not culpable in so doing, for the
ethnographers are not agreed upon it. Races have been classified on the
basis of color, on the basis of language, on the basis of supposed
origin, and in these latter days on the basis of the shape of the skull.
For our purpose we need consider only those large and apparent divisions
which have a direct bearing on the problem of assimilation, referring
those who seek the more subtle problems to other books.[4]
Mankind in general has been divided into three and again into five great
racial stocks, and one of these stocks, the Aryan or Indo-Germanic, is
represented among us by ten or more subdivisions which we also term
races. It need not cause confusion if we use the term "race" not only to
designate these grand divisions which are so far removed by nature one
from another as to render successful amalgamation an open question, but
also to designate those peoples or nationalities which we recognize as
distinct yet related within one of the large divisions. Within the area
controlled by the United States are now to be found representatives of
each of the grand divisions, or primary racial groups, and it would be a
fascinating study to turn from the more practical topics before us and
follow the races of man in their dispersion over the globe and their
final gathering together again under the republic of America. First is
the Aryan, or Indo-Germanic race, which, wherever it originated, sent
its Sanskrit conquerors to the South to plant themselves upon a black
race related to the Africans and the Australians. Its Western branch,
many thousand miles away, made the conquest and settlement of Europe.
Here it sent out many smaller branches, among them the Greeks and
Latins, whose situation on the Mediterranean helped in great measure to
develop brilliant and conquering civilizations, and who, after twenty
centuries of decay and subjection, have within the past twenty years
begun again their westward movement, this time to North and South
America. North of Greece the Aryans became the manifold Slavs, that most
prolific of races. One branch of the Slavs has spread the power of
Russia east and west, and is now crushing the alien Hebrew, Finn,
Lithuanian, and German, and even its fellow-Slav, the Pole, who, to
escape their oppressors, are moving to America. The Russian himself,
with his vast expanse of fertile prairie and steppe, does not migrate
across the water, but drives away those whom he can not or will not
assimilate. From Austria-Hungary, with its medley of races, come other
branches of the Slavs, the Bohemians, Moravians, Slovaks, Slovenians,
Croatians, Roumanians, Poles, and Ruthenians, some of them mistakenly
called Huns, but really oppressed by the true Hun, the Magyar, and by
the German. To the west of the Slavs we find the Teutonic branches of
the Aryans, the Germans, the Scandinavians, and, above all, the English
and Scotch-Irish with their descent from the Angles, Saxons, and Franks,
who have given to America our largest accessions in numbers, besides our
language, our institutions, and forms of government. Then other branches
of the Aryans known as Celtic, including the Irish, Scotch, and Welsh,
formerly driven into the hills and islands by the Teutons, have in these
latter days vied with the English and Germans in adding to our
population. The French, a mixture of Teuton and Celt, a nationality
noted above all others for its stationary population and dislike of
migration, are nevertheless contributing to our numbers by the
circuitous route of Canada, and are sending to us a class of people more
different from the present-day Frenchman in his native home than the
Italian or Portuguese is different from the Frenchman.
In the fertile valleys of Mesopotamia and the Tigris the Semitic race
had separated from its cousins, the Aryans, and one remarkable branch of
this race, the Hebrews, settling on a diminutive tract of land on the
eastern shore of the Mediterranean and finally driven forth as wanderers
to live upon their wits, exploited by and exploiting in turn every race
of Europe, have ultimately been driven forth to America by the thousands
from Russia and Austria where nearly one-half of their present number is
found.
Another race, the Mongolian, multiplying on the plains of Asia, sent a
conquering branch to the west, scattering the Slavs and Teutons and
making for itself a permanent wedge in the middle of Europe, whence,
under the name of Magyar, the true Hungarian, the Mongolians come to
America. Going in another direction from this Asiatic home the Mongolian
race has made the circuit of the globe, and the Chinese, Japanese, and
Koreans meet in America their unrecognized cousins of many thousand
years ago.
Last of the immigrants to be mentioned, but among the earliest in point
of time, is the black race from the slave coast of Africa. This was not
a free and voluntary migration of a people seeking new fields to escape
oppression, but a forced migration designed to relieve the white race of
toil. All of the other races mentioned, the Aryan, the Semitic, the
Mongolian, had in early times met one another and even perhaps had
sprung from the same stock, so that when in America they come together
there is presumably a renewal of former ties. But as far back as we can
trace the history of races in the records of archaeology or philology, we
find no traces of affiliation with the black race. The separation by
continents, by climate, by color, and by institutions is the most
diametrical that mankind exhibits anywhere. It is even greater than that
between the Aryan and the native American, improperly called the Indian,
whose presence on the soil which we have seized from him has furnished
us with a peculiar variation in our multiform race problem. For the
Indian tribes, although within our acquired territory, have been treated
as foreign nations, and their reservations have been saved to them under
the forms of treaties. Only recently has there sprung up a policy of
admitting them to citizenship, and therefore the Indian, superior in
some respects to the negro, has not interfered with our experiment in
democracy.
Last in point of time we have taken into our fold the Malay race, with
some seven million representatives in the Hawaiian and Philippine
Islands. Like the Indian and the negro, this race never in historic
times prior to the discovery of the new world came into close contact
with the white races. With its addition we have completed the round of
all the grand divisions of the human family, and have brought together
for a common experiment in self-government the white, yellow, black,
red, and brown races of the earth.
=Amalgamation and Assimilation.=--Scarcely another nation in ancient or
modern history can show within compact borders so varied an aggregation.
It is frequently maintained that a nation composed of a mixed stock is
superior in mind and body to one of single and homogeneous stock. But it
must be remembered that amalgamation requires centuries. The English
race is probably as good an example of a mixed race as can be found in
modern history, yet this race, though a mixture of the closely related
primitive Celt, the conquering Teuton, and the Latinized Scandinavian,
did not reach a common language and homogeneity until three hundred
years after the last admixture. We know from modern researches that all
of the races of Europe are mixed in their origin, but we also know that
so much of that mixture as resulted in amalgamation occurred at a time
so remote that it has been ascribed to the Stone Age.[5] The later
inroads have either been but temporary and have left but slight
impression, or they have resulted in a division of territory. Thus the
conquest of Britain by the Teutons and the Normans has not produced
amalgamation so much as it has caused a segregation of the Celts in
Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, and of the Teutons, with their later but
slight infusion of Normans, in England. On the continent of Europe this
segregation has been even more strongly marked. The present
stratification of races and nationalities has followed the upheavals and
inroads of a thousand years introduced by the decline and fall of the
Roman Empire. Two developments have taken place. A conquering race has
reduced a native population in part to subjection and has imposed upon
the natives its laws, customs, and language. In course of time the
subject race becomes a lower social class and slowly assimilates with
the upper classes, producing a homogeneous nationality with a new
evolution of laws, customs, and language. This is the history of four
great nations of Europe,--the French, the German, the English, the
Italian. The other development has been the segregation of a portion of
the conquered race, who having fled their conquerors avoid actual
subjection by escaping to the mountains and islands. Here they preserve
their original purity of stock and language. This is the history of
Austria-Hungary, whose earlier population of Slavs has been scattered
right and left by German and Hun and who now constitute separate
branches and dialects of the unassimilated races. That Austria-Hungary
with its dozen languages should be able to hold together as a "dual
empire" for many years is one of the marvels of history, and is
frequently ascribed to that which is the essence of autocracy, the
personal hold of the emperor.
The little bundle of republics known as Switzerland is a federation of
French, Germans, and Italians, who retain their languages and have
developed what out of such a conflict of races has elsewhere never been
developed, a high grade of democratic government. Here in historic times
there has been no amalgamation of races or assimilation of languages,
but there has been the distinct advantage of a secluded freedom from
surrounding feudal lords, which naturally led to a loose federation of
independent cantons. It is Switzerland's mountains and not her mixed
races that have promoted her democracy. At the other end of the world
the highest development of democracy is in the colonies of Australasia,
where a homogeneous race, protected from foreign foes, and prohibiting
the immigration of alien races and inferior classes, has worked out
self-government in politics and industry. In the Roman Empire we see the
opposite extreme. At first a limited republic, the extension of
conquests, and the incorporation of alien races led to that
centralization of power in the hands of one man which transformed the
republic into the empire. The British Empire, which to-day covers all
races of the earth, is growingly democratic as regards Englishmen, but
despotic as regards subject races. Taking the empire as a whole, neither
amalgamation nor self-government is within the possibilities of its
constitutional growth.
In America, on the other hand, we have attempted to unite all races in
one commonwealth and one elective government. We have, indeed, a most
notable advantage compared with other countries where race divisions
have undermined democracy. A single language became dominant from the
time of the earliest permanent settlement, and all subsequent races and
languages must adopt the established medium. This is essential, for it
is not physical amalgamation that unites mankind; it is mental
community. To be great a nation need not be of one blood, it must be of
one mind. Racial inequality and inferiority are fundamental only to the
extent that they prevent mental and moral assimilation. If we think
together, we can act together, and the organ of common thought and
action is common language. Through the prism of this noble instrument of
the human mind all other instruments focus their powers of assimilation
upon the new generations as they come forth from the disunited
immigrants. The public schools, the newspapers, the books, the political
parties, the trade unions, the religious propagandists with their
manifold agencies of universal education, the railroads with their
inducements to our unparalleled mobility of population, are all
dependent upon our common language for their high efficiency. Herein are
we fortunate in our plans for the Americanization of all races within
our borders. We are not content to let the fate of our institutions wait
upon the slow and doubtful processes of blood amalgamation, but are
eager to direct our energies toward the more rapid movements of mental
assimilation. Race and heredity may be beyond our organized control; but
the instrument of a common language is at hand for conscious improvement
through education and social environment.
CHAPTER II
COLONIAL RACE ELEMENTS
Doubtless the most fascinating topic in the study of races is that of
the great men whom each race has produced. The personal interest
surrounding those who have gained eminence carries us back over each
step of their careers to their childhood, their parents, and their
ancestry.[6] Pride of race adds its zest, and each race has its
eulogists who claim every great man whose family tree reveals even a
single ancestor, male or female, near or remote, of the eulogized race.
Here is a "conflict of jurisdiction," and the student who is without
race prejudice begins to look for causes other than race origin to which
should be ascribed the emergence of greatness.
Mr. Henry Cabot Lodge[7] attempted, some years ago, to assign to the
different races in America the 14,243 men eminent enough to find a place
in "Appleton's Encyclopedia of American Biography." He prepared a
statistical summary as follows:--
EMINENT AMERICANS
English 10,376
Scotch-Irish 1,439
German 659
Huguenot 589
Scotch 436
Dutch 336
Welsh 159
Irish 109
French 85
Scandinavian 31
Spanish 7
Italian 7
Swiss 5
Greek 3
Russian 1
Polish 1
------
Total 14,243
When we inquire into the methods necessarily adopted in preparing a
statistical table of this kind we discover serious limitations. Mr.
Lodge was confined to the paternal line alone, but if, as some
biologists assert, the female is the conservative element which holds to
the type, and the male is the variable element which departs from the
type, then the specific contribution of the race factor would be found
in the maternal line. However, let this dubious point pass. We find that
in American life two hundred years of intermingling has in many if not
in most cases of greatness broken into the continuity of race. True, the
New England and Virginia stock has remained during most of this time of
purely English origin, but the very fact that in Mr. Lodge's tables
Massachusetts has produced 2686 notables, while Virginia, of the same
blood, has produced only 1038, must lead to the suspicion that factors
other than race extraction are the mainspring of greatness.
It must be remembered that ability is not identical with eminence.
Ability is the product of ancestry and training. Eminence is an accident
of social conditions. The English race was the main contributor to
population during the seventeenth century, and English conquest
determined the form of government, the language, and the opportunities
for individual advancement. During the succeeding century the
Scotch-Irish and the Germans migrated in nearly equal numbers, and their
combined migration was perhaps as great as that of the English in the
seventeenth century. But they were compelled to move to the interior, to
become frontiersmen, to earn their living directly from the soil, and to
leave to their English-sprung predecessors the more prominent
occupations of politics, literature, law, commerce, and the army. The
Germans, who, according to Lodge, "produced fewer men of ability than
any other race in the United States," were further handicapped by their
language and isolation, which continue to this day in the counties of
Pennsylvania where they originally settled. On the other hand, the
Huguenots and the Dutch came in the first century of colonization. They
rapidly merged with the English, lost their language, and hence
contributed their full share of eminence. Finally, the Irish,
Scandinavian and other races, inconspicuous in the galaxy of
notables, did not migrate in numbers until the middle of the nineteenth
century, and, in addition to the restraints of language and poverty,
they found the roads to prominence preoccupied.
[Illustration: "RETURN OF THE MAYFLOWER" Painting by Boughton, 1834]
Besides the accident of precedence in time, a second factor distinct
from race itself has contributed to the eminence of one race over
another. The Huguenots and the French, according to Lodge's statistics,
show a percentage of ability in proportion to their total immigration
much higher than that of any other race. But the Huguenots were a select
class of people, manufacturers and merchants, perhaps the most
intelligent and enterprising of Frenchmen in the seventeenth century.
Furthermore the direct migration from France to this country has never
included many peasants and wage-earners, but has been limited to the
adventurous and educated. Had the French-Canadians who represent the
peasantry of France been included in these comparisons, the proportion
of French eminence would have been materially reduced.
The same is true of the English. Although sprung from one race, those
who came to America represented at least two grades of society as widely
apart as two races. The Pilgrims and Puritans of New England were the
yeomen, the merchants, the manufacturers, skilled in industry, often
independent in resources, and well trained in the intellectual
controversies of religion and politics. The Southern planters also
sprang from a class of similar standing, though not so strongly addicted
to intellectual pursuits. Beneath both these classes were the indentured
servants, a few of whom were men of ability forced to pay their passage
by service. But the majority of them were brought to this country
through the advertisements of shipowners and landholders or even
forcibly captured on the streets of cities or transported for crimes and
pauperism. Though all of these classes were of the same race, they were
about as widely divergent as races themselves in point of native ability
and preparatory training.
The third and most important cause of eminence, apart from ancestry, is
the industrial and legal environment. An agricultural community produces
very few eminent men compared with the number produced where
manufactures and commerce vie with agriculture to attract the youth. A
state of widely diversified industrial interests is likely to create
widely diversified intellectual and moral interests. Complicated
problems of industry and politics stimulate the mind and reflect their
influence in literature, art, education, science, and the learned
professions. Most of all, equal opportunity for all classes and large
prizes for the ambitious and industrious serve to stimulate individuals
of native ability to their highest endeavor. It was the deadening
effects of slavery, creating inequalities among the whites themselves,
that smothered the genius of the Southerner whether Englishman,
Huguenot, or Scotch-Irish, and it was the free institutions of the
North that invited their genius to unfold and blossom.
These considerations lead us to look with distrust on the claims of
those who find in race ancestry or in race intermixture the reasons for
such eminence as Americans have attained. While the race factor is
decisive when it marks off inferior and primitive races, yet, in
considering those Europeans races which have joined in our civilization,
the important questions are: From what social classes is immigration
drawn? and, Do our social institutions offer free opportunity and high
incentive to the youth of ability? In so far as we get a choice
selection of immigrants, and in so far as we afford them free scope for
their native gifts, so far do they render to our country the services of
genius, talent, and industry.
=Incentives to Immigration.=--It is the distinctive fact regarding
colonial migration that it was Teutonic in blood and Protestant in
religion. The English, Dutch, Swedes, Germans, and even the
Scotch-Irish, who constituted practically the entire migration, were
less than two thousand years ago one Germanic race in the forests
surrounding the North Sea. The Protestant Reformation, sixteen centuries
later, began among those peoples and found in them its sturdiest
supporters. The doctrines of the Reformation, adapted as they were to
the strong individualism of the Germanic races, prepared the hearts of
men for the doctrines of political liberty and constitutional government
of the succeeding century. The Reformation banished the idea that men
must seek salvation through the intercession of priests and popes, who,
however sacred, are only fellow-men, and set up the idea that each soul
has direct access to God. With the Bible as a guide and his own
conscience as a judge, each man was accountable only to one divine
sovereign.
From the standpoint of the age this doctrine was too radical. It tended
to break up existing society into sects and factions, and to precipitate
those civil and religious wars which ended in a Catholic or aristocratic
reaction. When this reaction came, the numerous Protestant sects of the
extremer types found themselves the objects of persecution, and nothing
remained but to seek a new land where the heavy hand of repression could
not reach them. Thus America became the home of numberless religious
sects and denominations of these several races. From England came
Congregationalists (the "Pilgrims"), Puritans, Quakers, Baptists; from
Scotland and Ireland came Presbyterians; from Germany came Quakers,
Dunkards, Pietists, Ridge Hermits, Salzburgers, and Moravians.
It is not to be inferred that religious persecution alone in the early
colonial period caused emigration. In point of numbers commercial
enterprise was probably equally influential. In Holland all religious
sects were welcomed with a liberality far in advance of any other
nation, and at the same time the Dutch people were the most advanced in
the modern pursuits of trade and commerce. The Dutch settlement of New
Amsterdam was therefore a business enterprise, and neither before nor
after the conquest by the British was there any religious obstacle to
the reception of other races and religions. In this respect New York
differed widely from New England, where religious exclusiveness
preserved the English race as a peculiar people until the middle of the
nineteenth century. So diverse were the races in New York, and so
liberal were the opportunities open to all, that Governor Horatio
Seymour was able to say that nine men prominent in its early history
represented the same number of nationalities. Schuyler was of Dutch
descent, Herkimer of German, Jay of French, Livingston of Scotch,
Clinton of Irish, Morris of Welsh, Hoffman of Swedish, while Hamilton
was a West India Englishman and Baron Steuben a Prussian.[8]
Another colony to which all races and religions were welcomed was
Pennsylvania. William Penn established this colony both as a refuge for
the persecuted Quakers of England and as a real estate venture. He was
the first American to advertise his dominions widely throughout Europe,
offering to sell one hundred acres of land at two English pounds and a
low rental. His advertisements combined humanity and business, for they
called attention to popular government and universal suffrage; equal
rights to all regardless of race or religious belief; trial by jury;
murder and treason the only capital crimes, and reformation, not
retaliation, the object of punishment for other offences. Thus
Pennsylvania, although settled a half century later than the Southern
and Northern colonies, soon exceeded them in population. Penn sent his
agents to Germany and persuaded large numbers of German Quakers and
Pietists to cast their lot in his plantation, so that in twenty years
the Germans numbered nearly one-half the population. Again, in the
beginning of the eighteenth century, when Louis XIV overran the
Palatinate and thousands of Germans fled to England, the English
government encouraged their migration to America. In one year four
thousand of them, the largest single emigration of the colonial period,
embarked for New York, but their treatment was so illiberal that they
moved to Pennsylvania, and thenceforth the German migration sought the
latter colony. These people settled at Germantown, near Philadelphia,
and occupied the counties of Bucks and Montgomery, where they continue
to this day with their peculiar language, the "Pennsylvania Dutch." Not
only William Penn himself, but other landowners in Pennsylvania and also
the shipowners advertised the country in Germany, and thousands of the
poorer sort of Germans were induced to indenture themselves to the
settlers to whom they were auctioned off by the ship captains in payment
for transportation. Probably one-half of all the immigrants of the
colonial period came under this system of postpaid transportation, just
as at the present time nearly two-thirds come on prepaid tickets. It was
in Pennsylvania that the largest portion of the Scotch-Irish settled,
and before the time of the Revolution that colony had become the most
populous and most diversified of all the colonies. It was the only
colony, except Maryland, that tolerated Roman Catholics, and with all
phases of the Christian religion and all branches of the Teutonic and
Celtic races, Pennsylvania set the original type to which all of America
has conformed, that of race intermixture on the basis of religious and
political equality.
=The Scotch-Irish.=--It has long been recognized that among the most
virile and aggressive people who came to America in colonial times, and
who have contributed a peculiar share to the American character, are the
Scotch-Irish. Their descendants boast of their ancestry and cite long
lists of notables as their coderivatives. Yet until recent years it has
been the misfortune of the Scotch-Irish to have escaped historical
investigation; for American history has been written chiefly in New
England, whose colonial Puritans forbade them in their midst. In fact,
from the earliest settlement, the Scotch-Irish have been pioneers and
men of action. They have contributed to America few writers and artists,
but many generals, politicians, and captains of industry. In literature
they claim two eminent names, Irving and Poe; but in the army, navy,
politics, and business they claim John Paul Jones, Perry, Andrew
Jackson, Winfield Scott, Zachary Taylor, Ulysses S. Grant, Stonewall
Jackson, George B. McClellan, Alexander Hamilton, John C. Calhoun, James
G. Blaine, Jefferson Davis, Thomas Benton, Hendricks, John G. Carlisle,
Mark Hanna, William McKinley, Matthew S. Quay, Andrew Carnegie, John D.
Rockefeller, Horace Greeley, Henry Watterson, and hundreds alike famous
in the more strenuous movements of American life.
A paradoxical fact regarding the Scotch-Irish is that they are very
little Scotch and much less Irish. That is to say, they do not belong
mainly to the so-called Celtic race, but they are the most composite of
all the people of the British Isles. They are called Scots because they
lived in Scotia, and they are called Irish because they moved to
Ireland. Geography and not ethnology has given them their name. They are
a mixed race through whose veins run the Celtic blood of the primitive
Scot and Pict, the primitive Briton, the primitive Irish, but with a
larger admixture of the later Norwegian, Dane, Saxon, and Angle. How
this amalgamation came about we may learn from the geography of
Scotland.
The Highlands of Scotland begin at the Grampian Hills and the Lowlands
extend south from this line to the British border, and include the
cities of Glasgow and Edinburgh. The Scotch-Irish came from that
southwestern part of the Lowlands which bulges out toward Ireland north
of the Solway Firth. Over these Lowland counties, bounded by water and
hills on three sides, successive waves of conquest and migration
followed. First the primitive Caledonian or Pict was driven to the
Highlands, which to this day is the Celtic portion of Scotland. The
Briton from the south, pressed on by Roman and then by Teuton, occupied
the country. Then Irish tribes crossed over and gained a permanent hold.
Then the Norwegian sailors came around from the north, and to this day
there are pure Scandinavian types on the adjacent islands. Then the
Saxons and Angles, driven by the Danes and Normans, gained a foothold
from the east, and lastly the Danes themselves added their contingent.
Here in this Lowland pocket of territory, no larger than a good-sized
American county, was compounded for five hundred years this remarkable
amalgam of races.
A thousand years later, after they had become a united people and had
shown their metal in the trying times of the Reformation, they furnished
the emigrants who displaced the Irish in the north of Ireland. James I,
whom Scotland gave to England, determined to transform Catholic Ireland
into Protestant England, and thereupon confiscated the lands of the
native chiefs in Ulster and bestowed them upon Scottish and English
lords on condition that they settle the territory with tenants from
Scotland and England. This was the "great settlement" of 1610, and from
that time to the present Ulster has been the Protestant stronghold of
Ireland. In 1901 the population of Ulster was 44 per cent Catholic, 23
per cent Episcopalian, and 27 per cent Presbyterian, an ecclesiastical
division corresponding almost exactly to the racial division of Irish,
English, and Scotch. During the whole of the seventeenth century--the
first century of this occupation--the Catholics and Episcopalians were
in a much smaller proportion than these figures show for the present
time, and the relative increase in Irish and Episcopalians during the
eighteenth century was closely connected with the migration of the
Scotch to America.
For one hundred years the Scotch multiplied in Ulster and had no
dealings with the remnants of the Irish, whom they crowded into the
barren hills and whom they treated like savages. They retained their
purity of race, and although when they came to America they called
themselves Irish and were known as Irish wherever they settled, yet they
had no Irish blood except that which entered into their composition
through the Irish migration to Scotia fifteen hundred years before.
Yet, though they despised the Irish, they could not escape the unhappy
fate of Ireland. The first blow came in 1698, nearly one hundred years
after their settlement. English manufacturers complained of Irish
competition, and the Irish Parliament, a tool of the British crown,
passed an act totally forbidding the exportation of Irish woollens, and
another act forbidding the exportation of Irish wool to any country
save England. Their slowly growing linen industry was likewise
discriminated against in later years. Presbyterian Ulster had been the
industrial centre of Ireland, and these acts nearly destroyed her
industry. Next Queen Anne's Parliament adopted penal laws directed
against Roman Catholics and Presbyterians, and the Test Act, which
compelled public officials to take the communion of the Established
Church, deprived the entire Scotch population of self-government.
Nevertheless they were compelled to pay tithes to support the
Established Church to which they were opposed. Lastly, the hundred-year
leases of the tenants began to run out, and the landlords offered
renewals to the highest bidders on short leases. Here the
poverty-stricken Irish gained an unhappy revenge on the Scotch who had
displaced them of their ancestral lands, for their low standard of
living enabled them to offer rack-rents far above what the Scotch could
afford. No longer did religion, race pride, or gratitude have a part in
holding Ulster to Protestant supremacy. The greed of absentee landlords
began to have full sway, and in the resulting struggle for livelihood,
hopeless poverty was fitter to survive than ambitious thrift.
The Scotch tenants, their hearts bitter against England and aristocracy,
now sought a country where they might have free land and
self-government. In 1718 it is stated that 4200 of them left for
America. After the famine of 1740 there were 12,000 who left annually.
Altogether, in the half century just preceding the American Revolution,
200,000[9] persons, or one-third of the Protestant population of Ulster,
are said to have emigrated, and the majority came to America. This was
by far the largest contribution of any race to the population of America
during the eighteenth century, and the injustice they suffered at the
hands of England made them among the most determined and effective
recruits to the armies that won our independence.
Before the Scotch-Irish moved to America the Atlantic coast line had
been well occupied. Consequently, in order to obtain land for
themselves, they were forced to go to the interior and to become
frontiersmen. They found in Massachusetts a state church to which they
must conform in order to be admitted to citizenship. But what they had
left Ireland to escape they would not consent in a new country to do.
The Puritans were willing that they should occupy the frontier as a
buffer against the Indians, and so they took up lands in New Hampshire,
Vermont, Western Massachusetts, and Maine. Only a few congregations,
however, settled in New England--the bulk of the immigrants entered by
way of Philadelphia and Baltimore and went to the interior of
Pennsylvania surrounding and south of Harrisburg. They spread through
the Shenandoah valley and in the foothill regions of Virginia and
North and South Carolina. Gradually, they pushed farther west, across
the mountains into Western Pennsylvania about Pittsburg, and into Ohio,
Kentucky, and Tennessee. In all of these regions they fought the
Indians, protected the older inhabitants from inroads, and developed
those pioneer qualities which for one hundred years have characterized
the "winning of the West."
[Illustration: ANGLO-SAXON MOUNTAINEERS, BEREA COLLEGE, KENTUCKY]
The Scotch-Irish occupied a peculiar place in the new world. More than
any other race they served as the amalgam to produce, out of divergent
races, a new race, the American. The Puritans of New England, the
Quakers of Pennsylvania, the Cavaliers of Virginia, were as radically
different as peoples of different races, and they were separated from
each other in their own exclusive communities. The Germans were
localized in Pennsylvania and Maryland, the Dutch in New York, but the
Scotch-Irish "alone of the various races in America were present in
sufficient numbers in all of the colonies to make their influence count;
and they alone of all the races had one uniform religion; had
experienced together the persecutions by state and church which had
deprived them at home of their civil and religious liberties; and were
the common heirs to those principles of freedom and democracy which had
been developed in Scotland as nowhere else. At the time of the American
Revolution there were ... in all above five hundred settlements
scattered over practically all the American colonies."[10] Trained as
they were in the representative democracy of the Scottish kirk, thrown
on their own resources in the wilderness, mingling with the pioneers of
many other races, they took the lead in developing that Western type
which in politics and industry became ultimately the American type; yet
they retained their original character, and the American to-day is more
at home in Glasgow than in London.
CHAPTER III
THE NEGRO
Although the negro races of Africa extend across the continent and from
the Sudan to Cape Colony, yet the races which yielded the largest supply
of slaves for America were confined to a narrow stretch of the Atlantic
coast near the equator. For nearly two thousand miles from Cape Verde
the coast of Africa runs southeast and easterly, and then for another
thousand miles it runs to the south, forming the Gulf of Guinea, and
from a belt of land along this coast practically all the negro
immigrants to America have come. Here several large rivers, the Senegal,
the Gambia, the Niger, and the Congo--furnished harbors for slave ships
and routes for slave traders from the interior. Two circumstances, the
climate and the luxuriant vegetation, render this region hostile to
continuous exertion. The torrid heat and the excessive humidity weaken
the will and exterminate those who are too strenuous; but this same heat
and humidity, with the fertile soil, produce unparalleled crops of
bananas, yams, and grains. Thus nature conspires to produce a race
indolent, improvident, and contented. Seventy-five per cent of the
deaths are said to be executions for supposed witchcraft, which has
killed more men and women than the slave trade. Formerly cannibalism
prevailed, but it has now been largely stamped out by European
governments. The native governments are tribal, and the chiefs sustain
themselves by their physical prowess and the help of priests and
medicine men. Property is mainly in women and slaves, and inheritance is
through the female, except among the nobility of Dahomey, where
primogeniture rules. Written laws and records are unknown. The people
are unstable, indifferent to suffering, and "easily aroused to ferocity
by the sight of blood or under great fear." They exhibit aversion to
silence and solitude, love of rhythm, excitability, and lack of reserve.
All travellers speak of their impulsiveness, strong sexual passion, and
lack of will power.[11]
Such, in brief, were the land and the people that furnished one-sixth of
our total population and two-fifths of our Southern population. In
shifting such a people from the torrid climate of equatorial Africa to
the temperate regions of America, and from an environment of savagery to
one of civilization, changes more momentous than those of any other
migration have occurred. First, it was only the strongest physical
specimens who survived the horrible tests of the slave catcher and the
slave ship. Slavery, too, as a system, could use to best advantage those
who were docile and hardy, and not those who were independent and
feeble. Just as in the many thousand years of man's domestication of
animals, the breechy cow and the balky horse have been almost eliminated
by artificial selection, so slavery tended to transform the savage by
eliminating those who were self-willed, ambitious, and possessed of
individual initiative. Other races of immigrants, by contact with our
institutions, have been civilized--the negro has been only domesticated.
Democratic civilization offers an outlet for those who are morally and
intellectually vigorous enough to break away from the stolid mass of
their fellows; domestication dreads and suppresses them as dangerous
rebels. The very qualities of intelligence and manliness which are
essential for citizenship in a democracy were systematically expunged
from the negro race through two hundred years of slavery. And then, by
the cataclysm of a war in which it took no part, this race, after many
thousand years of savagery and two centuries of slavery, was suddenly
let loose into the liberty of citizenship and the electoral suffrage.
The world never before had seen such a triumph of dogmatism and
partizanship. It was dogmatism, because a theory of abstract equality
and inalienable rights of man took the place of education and the slow
evolution of moral character. It was partisanship, because a political
party, taking advantage of its triumph in civil war, sought to
perpetuate itself through the votes of its helpless beneficiaries. No
wonder that this fateful alliance of doctrinaires and partizans brought
fateful results, and that, after a generation of anarchy and race
hatred, the more fundamental task of education has only just begun.
True, there was a secondary object in view in granting the freedmen
suffrage. The thirteenth amendment, adopted in 1865, legalized and
extended the proclamation of emancipation, which had been a war measure.
But this was followed by servile and penal laws in all the Southern
states that looked like peonage in place of slavery.[12] Congress then
submitted the fourteenth amendment, which was adopted in 1867, creating
a new grade of citizenship--citizenship of the nation--and prohibiting
any state from depriving "any person of life, liberty, or property
without the due process of law" and from denying to any person "the
equal protection of the laws." But this was not enough. The next step
was the fifteenth amendment adopted in 1869, prohibiting any state from
denying the suffrage to citizens of the United States "on account of
race, color, or previous condition of servitude." Thus equality before
the law was to be protected by equality in making the law. This object
was a worthy one, and it added the appearance of logical necessity to
the theories of doctrinaires and the schemes of partisans. But it failed
because based on a wrong theory of the ballot. Suffrage means
self-government. Self-government means intelligence, self-control, and
capacity for cooperation. If these are lacking, the ballot only makes
way for the "boss," the corruptionist, or the oligarchy. The suffrage
must be earned, not merely conferred, if it is to be an instrument of
self-protection.
But it is the peculiar fate of race problems that they carry contestants
to bitter extremes and afford no field for constructive compromise.
Could the nation have adopted Lincoln's project of a hundred years, or
even thirty years, of gradual emancipation, it might have avoided both
the evils of war and the fallacies of self-government. But the spirit of
race aggrandisement that precipitated the one rendered the other
inevitable. With the negro suddenly made free by conquest, each fatal
step in reconstruction was forced by the one that preceded. The North,
the South, and the negro were placed in an impossible situation, and a
nation which dreaded negro suffrage in 1868[13] adopted it in 1869.
For eight years the government of the Southern states was in the hands
of the negroes. The result of turning the states over to ignorant and
untried voters was an enormous increase of debt without corresponding
public improvements or public enterprises. Even the negro governments
themselves began to repudiate these debts and they were almost wholly
repudiated by the whites after returning to power.
It is not necessary to dwell upon the methods by which the white voters
regained and kept control of the states. Admittedly it was through
intimidation, murder, ballot-box "stuffing," and false counting. The
negro vote has almost disappeared, and in more recent years that which
was accomplished through violence is perpetuated through law.
Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina, North Carolina, Alabama, and
Virginia have adopted so-called "educational" tests with such adroit
exceptions that white illiterates may vote, but negroes, whether
literate or illiterate, may be excluded from voting. As stated by a
prominent white Virginian, "the negro can vote if he has $300, or if he
is a veteran of the Federal or Confederate armies, or if he is a
profound constitutional lawyer." The fifteenth amendment, by decisions
of the United States Supreme Court, has been rendered inoperative, and
the fourteenth amendment, without helping the negro, for whom it was
designed,[14] has raised up government by private corporations which
never had been thought of as needing an amendment. With these decisions
it may be taken for granted that the negro will not again in the near
future enjoy the privilege of a free ballot.
This is a situation in which the North is as deeply interested as the
South. The South, during the period of slavery, through the privilege of
counting three-fifths of the slaves, enjoyed a predominance in Congress
and in presidential elections beyond its proportion of white voters. The
South now enjoys a greater privilege because it counts all the negroes.
The fourteenth amendment expressly provides for a situation like this.
It says:--
"When the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for
president and vice-president of the United States, representatives in
Congress, the executive and judicial officers of a state, or the members
of the legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of
such state, being twenty-one years of age and citizens of the United
States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion or
other crime, the basis of representation shall be reduced in the
proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the
whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such state."
Whether it will be possible under our form of government to carry out
this provision of the fourteenth amendment may be doubted, but that it
is fast becoming a question of live interest is certain. The educational
test is a rational test, but it is rational only when the state makes an
honest and diligent effort to equip every man to pass the test. The
former slave states spend $2.21 per child for educating the negroes, and
$4.92 per child for educating the whites.[15] The great lesson already
learned is that we must "begin over again" the preparation of the negro
for citizenship. This time the work will begin at the bottom by
educating the negro for the ballot, instead of beginning at the top by
giving him the ballot before he knows what it should do for him. What
shall be the nature of this education?
=Education and Self-help.=--We have argued that democracy must be based
upon intelligence, manliness, and cooperation. How can these qualities
be produced in a race just emerged from slavery?
Intelligence is more than books and letters--it is knowledge of the
forces of nature and ingenuity enough to use them for human service. The
negro is generally acknowledged to be lacking in "the mechanical idea."
In Africa he hardly knows the simplest mechanical principles. In America
the brightest of the negroes were trained during slavery by their
masters in the handicrafts, such as carpentry, shoemaking, spinning,
weaving, blacksmithing, tailoring, and so on. A plantation became a
self-supporting unit under the oversight and discipline of the whites.
But the work of the negro artisans was careless and inefficient. The
negro blacksmith fastened shoes to the plantation mule, but the horses
were taken to the white blacksmith in town. Since emancipation the young
generation has not learned the mechanical trades to the same extent as
the slave generations. Moreover, as machinery supplants tools and
factories supplant handicrafts, the negro is left still farther behind.
"White men," says a negro speaker,[16] "are bringing science and art
into menial occupations and lifting them beyond our reach. In my boyhood
the walls and ceilings were whitewashed each spring by colored men; now
this is done by a white man managing a steam carpet-cleaning works.
Then the laundry work was done by negroes; now they are with difficulty
able to manage the new labor-saving machinery." Even in the
non-mechanical occupations the negro is losing where he once had a
monopoly. In Chicago "there is now scarcely a negro barber in the
business district. Nearly all the janitor work in the large buildings
has been taken away from them by the Swedes. White men and women as
waiters have supplanted colored men in nearly all the first-class hotels
and restaurants. Practically all of the shoe polishing is now done by
Greeks."[17]
Individual negroes have made great progress, but what we need to know is
whether the masses of the negroes have advanced. The investigators of
Atlanta University, in summarizing the reports of three hundred and
forty-four employers of negroes, conclude: "There are a large number of
negro mechanics all over the land, but especially in the South. Some of
these are progressive, efficient workmen. More are careless, slovenly,
and ill-trained. There are signs of lethargy among these artisans, and
work is slipping from them in some places; in others they are awakening
and seizing the opportunities of the new industrial South."[18]
The prejudice of white workmen has undoubtedly played a part in
excluding the negro from mechanical trades, but the testimony of large
employers, who have no race prejudice where profits can be made, also
shows that low-priced negro labor often costs more than high-priced
white labor. The iron and steel mills of Alabama have no advantage in
labor cost over mills of Pennsylvania and Ohio.
The foundation of intelligence for the modern workingman is his
understanding of mechanics. Not until he learns through manual and
technical training to handle the forces of nature can the workingman
rise to positions of responsibility and independence. This is as
important in agricultural labor, to which the negro is largely
restricted, as in manufactures. Intelligence in mechanics leads to
intelligence in economics and politics, and the higher wages of
mechanical intelligence furnish the resources by which the workman can
demand and secure his political and economic rights.
The second requisite of democracy is independence and manliness. These
are moral qualities based on will power and steadfastness in pursuit of
a worthy object. But these qualities are not produced merely by
exhortation and religious revivals. They have a more prosaic and secular
foundation. History shows that no class or nation has risen to
independence without first accumulating property. However much we
disparage the qualities of greed and selfishness which the rush for
wealth has made obnoxious, we must acknowledge that the solid basis of
the virtues is thrift. The improvidence of the negro is notorious. His
neglect of his horse, his mule, his machinery, his eagerness to spend
his earnings on finery, his reckless purchase of watermelons, chickens,
and garden stuff, when he might easily grow them on his own patch of
ground,--these and many other incidents of improvidence explain the
constant dependence of the negro upon his employer and his creditor.
There are, of course, notable exceptions where negroes have accumulated
property through diligent attention and careful oversight.[19] These are
all the more notable when it is remembered that the education of the
negro has directed his energies to the honors of the learned professions
rather than to the commonplace virtues of ownership, and that one great
practical experiment in thrift--the Freedman's Bank--went down through
dishonesty and incapacity. With the more recent development of the
remarkable institutions of Hampton and Tuskegee and their emphasis on
manual training and property accumulation, it is to be expected that
these basic qualities of intelligence and independence will receive
practical and direct encouragement.
Cooperation is the third and capital equipment for attaining the rights
of citizenship. There are two forms of cooperation--a lower and a
higher. The lower is that of the chief or the boss who marshals his
ignorant followers through fear or spoils. The higher is that of
self-government where those who join together do so through their own
intelligence and mutual confidence. In the lower form there are
personal jealousies and factional contests which prevent united action
under elected leaders. Negro bosses and foremen are more despotic than
white bosses. The Colored Farmers' Alliance depended upon a white man
for leadership. The white "carpet-baggers" organized the negro vote in
the reconstruction period. The negro was in this low stage of
cooperation because he was jealous or distrustful of his fellow-negro
and could rally together only under the banner of a leader whom he could
not depose. With the growth of intelligence and moral character there
comes a deepening sense of the need of organization as well as leaders
of their own race whom they can trust. The most hopeful indication of
progress for the negroes is the large number of voluntary religious,
beneficial, and insurance societies whose membership is limited to those
of their own color.[20]
Liberty has always come through organization. The free cities of Europe
were simply the guilds of peasants and merchants who organized to
protect themselves against the feudal lords and bishops. Latterly they
gained a voice in parliaments as the "third estate" and established our
modern representative democracy. The modern trade unions have become a
power far in excess of their numbers through the capacity of the workman
to organize. With the modest beginnings of self-organization among
negroes the way is opening for their more effective participation in
the higher opportunities of our civilization.
[Illustration: COUNTIES HAVING A LARGER PROPORTION OF NEGROES IN 1900
THAN IN 1880]
The negro trade unionist has not as yet shown the organizing capacity of
other races. Only among the mine workers, the longshoremen, and
bricklayers are they to be found in considerable numbers, although the
carpenters have negro organizers. But in most of these cases the negro
is being organized by the white man not so much for his own protection
as for the protection of the white workman. If the negro is brought to
the position of refusing to work for lower wages than the white man he
has taken the most difficult step in organization; for the labor union
requires, more than any other economic or business association in modern
life, reliance upon the steadfastness of one's fellows. Unfortunately,
when the negro demands the same wages as white men, his industrial
inferiority leads the employer to take white men in his place, and here
again we see how fundamental is manual and technical intelligence as a
basis for other progress.[21]
It must not be inferred because we have emphasized these qualities of
intelligence--manliness and cooperation as preparatory to political
rights--that the negro race should be deprived of the suffrage until
such time as its members acquire these qualities. Many individuals have
already acquired them. To exclude such individuals from the suffrage is
to shut the door of hope to all. An honest educational test honestly
enforced on both whites and blacks is the simplest rough-and-ready
method for measuring the progress of individuals in these qualities of
citizenship. There is no problem before the American people more vital
to democratic institutions than that of keeping the suffrage open to the
negro and at the same time preparing the negro to profit by the
suffrage.
Neither should the negro be excluded from the higher education.
Leadership is just as necessary in a democracy as in a tribe.
Self-government is not suppression of leaders but cooperation with them.
The true leader is one who knows his followers because he has suffered
with them, but who can point the way out and inspire them with
confidence. He feels what they feel, but can state what they cannot
express. He is their spokesman, defender, and organizer. Not a social
class nor a struggling race can reach equality with other classes and
races until its leaders can meet theirs on equal terms. It cannot depend
on others, but must raise up leaders from its own ranks. This is the
problem of higher education--not that scholastic education that ends in
itself, but that broad education that equips for higher usefulness. If
those individuals who are competent to become lawyers, physicians,
teachers, preachers, organizers, guides, innovators, experimenters, are
prevented from getting the right education, then there is little hope
for progress among the race as a whole, in the intelligence, manliness,
and cooperation needed for self-government.
=Growth of Negro Population.=--After the census of 1880 it was confidently
asserted that the negro population was increasing more rapidly than the
white population. But these assertions, since the census of 1890, have
disappeared. It then became apparent that the supposed increase from
1870 to 1880 was based on a defective count in 1870, the first census
after emancipation. In reality the negro element, including mulattoes,
during the one hundred and ten years of census taking, has steadily
declined in proportion to the white element. Although negroes in
absolute numbers have increased from 757,000 in 1790 to 4,442,000 in
1860, and 8,834,000 in 1900, yet in 1790 they were one-fifth of the
total population; in 1860 they were one-seventh and in 1900 only
one-ninth.
It is naturally suggested that this relative decrease in negro
population has been owing to the large immigration of whites, but the
inference is unwarranted. In the Southern states the foreign element has
increased less rapidly than the native white element, yet it is in the
Southern states that the negro is most clearly falling behind. In the
twenty years from 1880 to 1900 the whites in eighteen Southern states
without the aid of foreign immigration increased 57 per cent and the
negroes only 33 per cent.[22] In only six Southern states, West
Virginia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Arkansas, have
the negroes, during the past ten years, increased more rapidly than the
whites, and in only three of these states, Alabama, Mississippi, and
Arkansas, was the relative increase significant. In but two states,
South Carolina and Mississippi, does the negro element predominate, and
in another state, Louisiana, a majority were negroes in 1890, but a
majority were whites in 1900. "At the beginning of the nineteenth
century the Southern negroes were increasing much faster than the
Southern whites. At the end of it they were increasing only about
three-fifths as fast."[23]
This redistribution of negroes is an interesting and significant fact
regarding the race and has a bearing on its future. Two movements are
taking place, first to the fertile bottom lands of the Southern states,
second to the cities, both North and South. Mr. Carl Kelsey has shown
this movement to the lowlands in an interesting way.[24] He has prepared
a geological map of Alabama, which with Mississippi has received the
largest accession of negroes, and has shown the density of negro
population according to the character of the soil. In this map it
appears that the prairie and valley regions contain a proportion of 50
per cent to 90 per cent negroes, while the sand hill and pine levels
contain only 10 per cent to 50 per cent, and the piedmont or foothill
region less than 10 per cent. A similar segregation is found in other
Southern states, especially the alluvial districts of Mississippi and
Arkansas. In these fertile sections toward which the negroes gravitate,
the crops are enormous, and Mr. Kelsey points out a curious
misconception in the census summary, wherein the inference is drawn that
negroes are better farmers than whites because they raise larger crops.
"No wonder the negroes' crops are larger," when the whites farm the hill
country and the negroes till the delta, which "will raise twice as much
cotton per acre as the hills." Furthermore the negro, whether tenant or
owner, is under the close supervision of a white landlord or creditor,
who in self-protection keeps control of him, whereas the white farmer is
left to succeed or fail without expert guidance.
The migration of negroes to the cities is extremely significant. In ten
Southern states the proportion of the colored population was almost
exactly the same in 1890 as it had been in 1860,--namely, 36 per
cent,--yet in sixteen cities of those states, as shown by Mr.
Hoffman,[25] the colored proportion increased from 19 per cent in 1860
to 29 per cent in 1890. This relative increase, however, did not
continue after 1890, for, according to the census of 1900, the
proportion of negroes in those cities was still 29 per cent. During the
past decade the negroes have increased relatively faster in Northern
cities. The white population of Chicago increased threefold from 1880 to
1900, and the colored population fivefold. The white population of
Philadelphia during the same period increased 50 per cent and the
colored population 100 per cent. In the thirty-eight largest cities of
the country the negro population in ten years increased 38 per cent and
the white population, including foreign immigration, increased 33 per
cent. In thirty Northern and border cities during the past census decade
the negroes gained 167,000, and in twenty Southern cities they gained
80,000.[26]
The Southern whites also are moving from the South, and in larger
proportions than the negroes, though the movement of both is small. In
1900, 7 per cent of the whites of Southern birth lived in the North and
West and only 4.3 per cent of the negroes of Southern birth. But the
negroes who go North go to the cities, and the whites to the country.
Three-fifths (58 per cent) of these northbound negroes moved to the
larger cities and only one-fourth (26 per cent) of the northbound
whites.[27]
The accompanying map, derived from the census of 1900,[28] shows clearly
both of these movements of negro population. The shaded areas indicate
the counties where negroes formed a larger proportion of the population
in 1900 than they did twenty years earlier, in 1880. Here can be seen
the movement to the low and fertile lands of the South and the cities of
the North and South. There are but two areas in California and Colorado,
not included on the map, where the population of negroes has increased,
and one of these contains the city of Los Angeles.
Were the negroes in the cities to scatter through all the sections, the
predominating numbers of the white element might have an elevating
influence, but, instead, the negroes congregate in the poorer wards,
where both poverty and vice prevail. Hoffman has shown that two-thirds
of the negroes in Chicago live in three wards, which contain all the
houses of ill-fame in that part of the city. The same is true of
Philadelphia, Boston, and Cincinnati.[29] In these sections negro
prostitution has become an established institution, catering to the
Italian and other lower grades of immigrants, and supporting in idleness
many negro men as solicitors.
We have seen that the negro population has not kept pace with the native
white population. The reason is found in the smaller excess of births
over deaths. Statistics of births are almost entirely lacking in the
United States. Statistics of deaths are complete for only portions of
Northern states and a few Southern cities, containing, in 1900, in all,
27,500,000 whites and 1,180,000 negroes. Of this number, 20,500,000
whites and 1,100,000 negroes lived in cities, so that the showing which
the census is able to give is mainly for cities North and South and for
rural sections only in the North.[30] It appears that for every 1000
colored persons living in these cities the deaths in 1900 were 31.1,
while for every 1000 white persons the deaths were only 17.9. That is to
say, the colored death-rate was 73 per cent greater than the white
death-rate.
In the rural districts there was much less difference. The colored
death-rate was 19.1 and the white death-rate 15.3, a colored excess of
25 per cent.
=Morals and Environment.=--In explaining the excessive colored mortality
there are two classes of opinions. One explains it by social conditions,
the other by race traits. The one points to environment, the other to
moral character. The one is socialistic, the other individualistic.
These different views exist among colored people themselves, and one of
the encouraging signs is the scientific and candid interest in the
subject taken by them under the leadership of Atlanta University. A
colored physician who takes the first view states his case
forcibly:[31]--
"Is it any wonder that we die faster than our white brother when he gets
the first and best attention, while we are neglected on all sides? They
have the best wards and treatment at the hospital, while we must take it
second hand or not at all; they have all the homes for the poor and
friendless, we have none; they have a home for fallen women, we have
none; they have the public libraries where they can get and read books
on hygiene and other subjects pertaining to health, we have no such
privileges; they have the gymnasiums where they can go and develop
themselves physically, we have not; they have all the parks where they
and their children can go in the hot summer days and breathe the pure,
cool air, but for fear we might catch a breath of that air and live,
they put up large signs, which read thus, 'For white people only'; they
live in the best homes, while we live in humble ones; they live in the
cleanest and healthiest parts of the city, while we live in the
sickliest and filthiest parts of the city; the streets on which they
live are cleaned once and twice a day, the streets on which we live are
not cleaned once a month, and some not at all; besides, they have plenty
of money with which they can get any physician they wish, any medicine
they need, and travel for their health when necessary; all of these
blessings we are deprived of. Now, my friends, in the face of all these
disadvantages, do you not think we are doing well to stay here as long
as we do?"
Another colored writer, less eloquent, but not less accurate, in
summarizing the statistics collected under the guidance of Atlanta
University concludes:[32]--
"Overcrowding in tenements and houses occupied by colored people does
not exist to any great extent, and is less than was supposed.
"In comparison with white women, an excess of colored women support
their families, or contribute to the family support, by occupation which
takes them much of their time from home, to the neglect of their
children.
"Environment and the sanitary condition of houses are not chiefly
responsible for the excessive mortality among colored people.
"Ignorance and disregard of the laws of health are responsible for a
large proportion of this excessive mortality."
It is pointed out by these colored students and by many others that the
excessive mortality of colored people is owing to pulmonary consumption,
scrofula, and syphilis, all of which are constitutional; and to infant
mortality due also to constitutional and congenital disease. The census
of 1900 reports for a portion of the Northern states that for every 1000
white children under five years of age there were 49.7 deaths in one
year, and for every 1000 colored children under five years there were
118.5 deaths, an excess of negro infant mortality of 137 per cent.[33]
The census also reports that negro deaths in cities owing to consumption
are proportionately 2.8 times as many as white deaths,[34] deaths owing
to pneumonia are 89 per cent greater,[35] while deaths owing to
contagious causes, such as measles, scarlet fever, diphtheria,[36] are
but slightly greater or actually less than the white deaths in
proportion to population. In the city of Charleston, where mortality
statistics of negroes were compiled before the war, it has been shown
that from 1822 to 1848 the colored death-rate from consumption was a
trifle less than the white, but since 1865 the white mortality from that
cause has decreased 38 per cent, while the negro mortality has increased
70 per cent.[37] The death-rates from consumption in Charleston in 1900
were 189.8 for 100,000 whites and 647.7 for 100,000 negroes, an excess
of 241 per cent. The lowest negro death-rate reported from consumption
in cities is 378.5 for Memphis, but in that city the white death-rate
from the same cause is 169.9, a negro excess of 123 per cent.[38]
At a conference held at Atlanta University, Professor Harris, of Fisk
University, concluded:[39]--
"I have now covered the ground to which our excessive death-rate is
mainly due; namely, pulmonary diseases, especially consumption and
pneumonia, scrofula, venereal diseases, and infant mortality. If we
eliminate these diseases, our excessive death-rate will be a thing of
the past.... While I do not depreciate sanitary regulations and a
knowledge of hygienic laws, I am convinced that a _sine qua non_ of a
change for the better in the negro's physical condition is a higher
social morality.... From the health reports of all our large Southern
cities we learn that a considerable amount of our infant mortality is
due to inanition, infantile debility, and infantile marasmus. Now what
is the case in regard to these diseases? The fact is that they are not
diseases at all, but merely the names of symptoms due to enfeebled
constitutions and congenital diseases, inherited from parents suffering
from the effects of sexual immorality and debauchery.... It is true that
much of the moral laxity which exists among us to-day arose out of
slavery.... But to explain it is not to excuse it. It is no longer our
misfortune as it was before the war; it is our sin, the wages of which
is our excessive number of deaths.... The presence of tubercular and
scrofulous diseases, consumption, syphilis, and leprosy, has caused the
weaker nations of the earth to succumb before the rising tide of
Christian civilization.... The history of nations teaches us that
neither war, nor famine, nor pestilence, exterminates them so completely
as do sexual vices."
CHAPTER IV
NINETEENTH CENTURY ADDITIONS
It is only since the year 1820 that the government of the United States
has kept a record of alien passengers arriving in this country. For
several years following 1820 the immigration was so slight as to be
almost negligible. It was not until 1820 that there were more than
20,000 arrivals. So accustomed have we become to large figures of
immigration that nothing less than 100,000 seems worth noting, and this
figure was not reached until 1842. Since then there have been only four
years of less than 100,000, and two of these were years of the Civil
War.
A striking fact which first attracts the attention of one who examines
the statistics since 1840 is the close sympathy between immigration and
the industrial prosperity and depression of this country. Indeed, so
close is the connection that many who comment on the matter have held
that immigration during the past century has been strictly an industrial
or economic phenomenon, depending on the opportunities in this country,
and that the religious and political causes which stimulated earlier
immigration no longer hold good.
A curved line on the accompanying chart has been drawn so as to show
the relative numbers of immigrants since 1800, and another line shows
the movement of imports of merchandise per capita of the population. The
latter, except for tariff changes, is a fair index of the cycles of
prosperity and depression. By following these two lines on the chart we
notice the coincidence is close, except for a few years prior to the
Civil War. Both movements reached high points in 1873, and fell to very
low points in 1879; then rose in 1882 and fell in 1885; then reached
another high point in 1892 and a low point in 1897; and finally, the
present period of prosperity and heavy imports brings the largest
immigration in the history of the country.
In following the history of immigration by races we shall see to what
extent the alleged coincidence between prosperity and immigration may be
counted as a social law. Probably in the middle of the century it was
not so much the opportunities for employment in this country as it was
conditions in Europe that drove people to our shores. When we come to
inquire as to the nationalities which constituted immigration at that
period, we shall find what these causes were. In 1846 occurred the
unparalleled potato rot in Ireland, when the year's crop of what had
become the sole food staple of the peasantry of that island was entirely
lost. The peasants had been reduced to subsistence on the cheapest of
all staples through the operations of a system of landlordism scarcely
ever paralleled on a large scale as a means of exploiting tenants.
It was found that land used for potatoes would support three times the
number of people as the same land sown to wheat, and the small tenants
or the cotter peasants paid the landlord a higher rent than could be
obtained from larger cultivators. Reduced to a diet of potatoes by an
economic system imposed by an alien race, the Irish people are one of
the many examples which we find throughout our studies of a subject
people driven to emigration by the economic injustices of a dominant
race. We shall find the same at a later time in Austria-Hungary, whence
the conquered Slav peoples are fleeing from the discrimination and
impositions of the ruling Magyar. We shall find it in Russia, whence the
Jew, the Finn, and the German are escaping from the oppression of the
Slav; and we shall find it in Turkey, whence the Armenian and the Syrian
flee from the exactions of the Turk. Just so was it in Ireland in the
latter half of the decade, 1840 to 1850, and the contention of the
apologist for England that the famine which drove the Irish across the
seas was an act of God, is but a weak effort to charge to a higher power
the sufferings of a heartless system devised to convert the utmost life
and energy of a subject race into gold for their exploiters. Much more
nearly true of the part played by the Divine hand in this catastrophe is
the report of the Society of Friends in Ireland, saying that the
mysterious dispensation with which their country had been visited was
"a means permitted by an All-wise Providence to exhibit more strikingly
the unsound state of its social condition."
[Illustration: MOVEMENT OF IMMIGRANTS, IMPORTS OF MERCHANDISE PER
CAPITA, AND IMMIGRANTS PER 10,000 POPULATION--1800 TO 1906.]
Thus we have an explanation of the incentives under which, even in a
period of industrial depression in this country, the unfortunate Irish
flocked hither. It is true that the population of Ireland had increased
during the century preceding the famine at a rate more rapid than that
of any other country of Europe. It was 3,000,000 in 1790, and over
8,000,000 in the year of the famine. At the present time it is only
5,000,000. The potato, above all other crops, enables the cultivator to
live from hand to mouth, and coupled with a landlord system which takes
away all above mere subsistence, this "de-moralizing esculent" aided the
apparent overpopulation. Certainly the dependence of an entire people on
a single crop was a most precarious condition.
During the five years, 1846 to 1850, more than a million and a quarter
of Irish emigrants left the ports of the United Kingdom, and during the
ten years, 1845 to 1855, more than a million and a quarter came to the
United States. So great a number could not have found means of
transportation had it not been for the enormous contributions of
government and private societies for assistance. Here began that
exportation of paupers on a large scale against which our country has
protested and finally legislated. Even this enormous migration was not
greatly in excess of the number that actually perished from starvation
or from the diseases incident thereto. The Irish migration since that
time has never reached so high a point, although it made a second great
advance in 1882, succeeding another famine, and it has now fallen far
below that of eastern races of Europe. Altogether the total Irish
immigration of over four million since 1821 places that race second of
the contributors to our foreign-born population, and, compared with its
own numbers, it leads the world, for in sixty years it has sent to us
half as many people as it contained at the time of its greatest
population. Scarcely another country has sent more than one-fifth.
Looking over a period of nearly three centuries, it is probably true
that the Germans have crossed the ocean in larger numbers than any other
race. We have already noted the large migration during the eighteenth
century, and the official records show that since 1820 there have
entered our ports more than 5,200,000 Germans, while Ireland was sending
4,000,000 and Great Britain 3,300,000.
The German migration of the nineteenth century was quite distinct in
character from that of the preceding century. The colonial migration was
largely induced on religious grounds, but that of the past century was
political and economic, with at first a notable prominence of
materialism respecting religion. From the time of the Napoleonic wars to
the revolution of 1848, the governments of Germany were despotic in
character, supporting an established church, while at the same time the
marvellous growth of the universities produced a class of educated
liberals. In the revolution of 1848 these took a leading part, and
although constitutional governments were then established, yet those who
had been prominent in the popular uprisings found their position
intolerable under the reactionary governments that followed. The
political exiles sought America, bringing their liberalism in politics
and religion, and forming with their descendants in American cities an
intellectual aristocracy. They sprang from the middle classes of
Germany, and latterly, when the wars with Austria and France had
provoked the spirit of militarism, thousands of peasants looked to
emigration for escape from military service. The severe industrial
depression of 1873-79 added a powerful contributing cause. Thus there
were two periods when German migration culminated; first in 1854, on
political grounds, second in 1882, on military and economic grounds.
Since the latter date a significant decline has ensued, and the present
migration of 32,000 from Germany is mainly the remnants of families
seeking here their relatives. A larger number of German immigrants,
55,000, comes from Austria-Hungary and Russia, those from the latter
country being driven from the Baltic provinces and the Volga settlements
by the "Russianizing" policy of the Slav.
=The Changing Character of European Immigration.=--Besides the Germans
and the Irish, the races which contributed the largest numbers of
immigrants during the middle years of the nineteenth century were the
English and Scandinavian. After the decline during the depression of
1879 there was an increase of all those races in 1882, a year when
nearly 800,000 immigrants arrived. At about that time began a remarkable
change in the character of immigration destined to produce profound
consequences.
This change was the rapid shifting of the sources of immigration from
Western to Eastern and Southern Europe. A line drawn across the
continent of Europe from northeast to southwest, separating the
Scandinavian Peninsula, the British Isles, Germany, and France from
Russia, Austria-Hungary, Italy, and Turkey, separates countries not only
of distinct races but also of distinct civilizations. It separates
Protestant Europe from Catholic Europe; it separates countries of
representative institutions and popular government from absolute
monarchies; it separates lands where education is universal from lands
where illiteracy predominates; it separates manufacturing countries,
progressive agriculture, and skilled labor from primitive hand
industries, backward agriculture, and unskilled labor; it separates an
educated, thrifty peasantry from a peasantry scarcely a single
generation removed from serfdom; it separates Teutonic races from Latin,
Slav, Semitic, and Mongolian races. When the sources of American
immigration are shifted from the Western countries so nearly allied to
our own, to Eastern countries so remote in the main attributes of
Western civilization, the change is one that should challenge the
attention of every citizen. Such a change has occurred, and it needs
only a comparison of the statistics of immigration for the year 1882
with those of 1902 and 1906 to see its extent. While the total number of
immigrants from Europe and Asiatic Turkey was approximately equal in
1882 and 1902, as shown in the accompanying table, yet in 1882 Western
Europe furnished 87 per cent of the immigrants and in 1902 only 22 per
cent, while the share of Southeastern Europe and Asiatic Turkey
increased from 13 per cent in 1882 to 78 per cent in 1902. During twenty
years the immigration of the Western races most nearly related to those
which have fashioned American institutions declined more than 75 per
cent, while the immigrants of Eastern and Southern races, untrained in
self-government, increased nearly sixfold. For the year 1906 the
proportions remain the same, although in the four years the total
immigration had increased two-thirds.
IMMIGRATION FROM EUROPE AND ASIATIC TURKEY BY COUNTRIES, 1882, 1902, 1906
1882 1902 1905
------------- ------------- -------------
NUMBER PER NUMBER PER NUMBER PER
CENT CENT CENT
Total Europe and
Asiatic Turkey 647,082 100 622,987 100 1,024,719 100
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Great Britain and
Ireland 179,423 27.7 46,036 7.4 102,241 10.0
Belgium 1,431 .2 2,577 .4 5,099 .5
Denmark 11,618 1.8 5,660 .9 7,741 .8
France 6,003 .9 5,117 .8 9,386 .9
Germany 250,630 38.7 26,304 4.2 37,564 3.7
Netherlands 9,517 1.1 2,284 .4 4,946 .5
Norway 29,101 4.5 17,404 2.8 21,730 2.1
Sweden 64,607 10.0 30,894 5.0 23,310 2.3
Switzerland 10,884 1.7 2,344 .4 3,846 .4
Total Western Europe 563,174 87.0 136,620 22.0 215,863 21.7
----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Italy 32,159 5.0 178,375 28.6 273,120 26.7
Portugal 42 [41] 5,307 .9 8,517 .8
Spain 378 [41] 975 .1 1,921 .1
Austria-Hungary 29,150 4.5 171,989 27.6 265,138 25.9
Russia 21,590 3.3 107,347 17.2 215,665 21.0
Greece [40]73 [41] 8,104 1.3 19,489 1.9
Roumania [40]77 [41] 7,196 1.2 4,476 .5
Servia, Bulgaria,
and Montenegro [41] 851 [41] 4,666 .5
Turkey in Europe [40]86 [41] 187 [41] 9,510 .9
Turkey in Asia 82 [41] 6,223 1.0 6,354 .6
Total Southern and
Eastern Europe and
Asiatic Turkey 83,637 13.0 486,367 78.0 808,856 78.9
----------------------------------------------------------------------
=Italians.=--It was at this period that Italian immigration first became
noticeable. Prior to 1880 this stream had been but the merest trickle,
which now has become the greatest of all the foreign tributaries to our
population. In 1873 the Italians for the first time reached 8000 in
number, but they fell to 3000 in 1876 and so continued in moderate
proportions, but suddenly in 1880 jumped to 12,000, and in 1882 to
32,000. Falling off again with the industrial depression to 13,000 in
1885, they reached 76,000 in 1891, and then with another depression to
35,000 in 1895 they have now gone forward by leaps to the high mark of
287,000.[42] The Italians seem destined to rival the Germans and Irish
as the leading contributors to our social amalgam. Of course only a
small part are as yet women and children, but this is because the
immigration is in its early and pioneer stages. The women and children
follow rapidly when the men have saved enough money to send for them.
One-fourth of the emigration is on tickets and money furnished by
friends and relatives in the United States.[43]
The immigrants from Italy differ from those from Austria, Russia,
Hungary, and Ireland, in that they are not driven forth by the
oppressions of a dominant race, but as a result of the economic and
political conditions of a united people. This does not indeed exclude
oppression as a cause of expatriation, but it transfers the oppression
from that of one race to that of one class upon another. By far the
larger portion of Italian immigration comes from the southern provinces
and from Sicily, where the power of the landlords is greatest. In these
provinces of large estates held by the nobility, the rents have been
forced to the highest notch, an orange garden paying as high as $160 per
year per acre, and the leases are short, so that the tenant has little
to encourage improvement.[44] In many cases the land is rented by large
capitalist farmers, who raise therefrom cattle, wheat, and olives, and
are prosperous men. But their prosperity is extracted from the miserable
wages of their laborers. The agricultural laborer gets from 8 cents to
32 cents a day through the year and 10 cents to 38 cents through the
summer. Unskilled laborers get 25 cents to 50 cents a day, and such
skilled trades as masons and carpenters get only 27 cents to $1.40 a
day. This wide range of wages corresponds generally with the South and
North, the lowest rates being in the South and the highest toward the
North. In France and England wages are two and one-half times higher
than in Italy, while in Germany they are about 30 per cent to 50 per
cent higher.
Nor must it be supposed that the cost of living is low to correspond
with the low wages. This is largely owing to the exaggerated system of
indirect taxes. Although wheat is a staple crop, yet the peasants eat
corn in preference, because, for a given expenditure, it gives a
stronger sense of repletion. Of wheat and corn meal together the Italian
peasant eats in a year only three-fourths as much as the inmate of an
English poorhouse. Of meat the peasant in Apulia gets no more than ten
pounds a year, while the English workhouse pauper gets fifty-seven
pounds. The local taxes on flour, bread, and macaroni are as high as 10
or 15 per cent of the value, and the state tax on imported wheat is
nearly 50 per cent of its value. The consumption of sugar has decreased
one-fourth since heavy duties were imposed to protect native beet sugar,
and it averages barely over five pounds per head. The consumption in the
United States is sixty-five pounds per head. The iniquitous salt tax
raises the price of salt from eleven pounds for two cents to one pound
for two cents, and the peasants sometimes cook their corn meal in sea
water, although this is smuggling. What the peasants lack in grain and
meat they strive to supply by vegetables, and the proportion of
vegetables, peas, and beans consumed is greater than that for any other
country of Europe. The peasants drink no beer, spirits, tea, nor coffee,
but the average annual consumption of wine is twenty gallons a head.
Food alone costs the peasants 85 per cent of their wages, whereas it
costs the German peasant 62 per cent and the American workman 41 per
cent. The poor and working classes pay over one-half the taxes,
amounting, even without wine, to 10 or 20 per cent of their wages. There
are in the south and Sardinia some 13,000 sales of land a year on
distress for non-payment of taxes, and the expropriated owners become
tenants. Several villages in Southern Italy have been almost wholly
abandoned and one village has recently announced its intention of
removing itself entire to one of the South American republics.[45] The
rich escape taxation, which is laid largely on consumption. Besides the
state tax on imports, each city and town has its _octroi_, or import
tax, on everything brought into the city. These "protective duties rob
the poor to fill the pockets of the rich landlord and manufacturer."
Since 1870 wealth has increased 17 per cent and taxes 30 per cent. Taxes
are nearly one-fifth of the nation's income, against one-twelfth in
Germany, one-sixteenth in England, and one-fifteenth in the United
States. Wages rose from 1860 to 1885, but since 1890 they have fallen.
The army and navy are the greatest drain on the resources of the people.
They cost one-fourth more of the national income than do the armies and
navies of France and Germany. Eighty million dollars a year for military
expenditures in Italy is over 5 per cent of the income of the people,
whereas $194,000,000 for the same purpose in the United States is less
than 2 per cent of our incomes. In the Triple Alliance of Germany,
Austria, and Italy, the latter country crushes its peasants in order to
make a showing by the side of its wealthier partners. The army takes
every able-bodied peasant from industry into barracks and drills for two
years of his best vigor. But the long line of exposed coast and the
general military situation in Europe make it unlikely that Italy for
many years can shake off this incubus.
In addition to all these economic and political causes of pressure,
there is another cause of a more profound nature, the rapid growth of
population. Strange as it may seem, the very poverty of Italy increases
the tendency to a high birth-rate, and the rate is highest in the very
districts where illiteracy and poverty are greatest. Only the great
number of deaths produced by poverty and lack of sanitation prevents the
increase of population from exceeding that of the more rapidly growing
countries of Germany, Great Britain, and Scandinavia. It is not among
those classes and nations, like the middle classes and the thrifty
people of France, that the largest number of children are born, but it
is among those ignorant and low-standard peoples to whom the future
offers no better prospect for their children than for themselves. Early
marriages and large families are both a result and a cause of poverty.
Parts of Lombardy and Venetia have a thicker population than any other
European country except Belgium, which is really not a country, but a
manufacturing centre of Europe. The density of population in Italy is in
excess of that of Germany, France, India, and even China. It is exceeded
only by the islands of Great Britain and Japan, and the states of Rhode
Island and Massachusetts.[46] Emigration is the only immediate relief
from this congestion. All other remedies which operate through raising
the intelligence and the standards of living require years for
appreciable results, but meanwhile the persistent birth-rate crowds new
competitors into the new openings and multiplies the need of economic
and political reforms before they can be put into effect. Emigration is
a relief ready at hand, but it is not a lessening of population. For
many years to come Italy will furnish a surplus population to overflow
to America.[47] Emigration is also a means of revenue for the mother
country. For it is estimated that the peasants in foreign countries send
back to their families and relatives $30,000,000 to $80,000,000 each
year, and many of them return with what to them is a fortune, and with
new ideas of industry and progress, to purchase and improve a farm and
cottage for their declining years. It is said that already there are
several small country towns in Southern Italy which have risen from
squalor to something of prosperity through the money and influence of
those who have come home. This temporary emigration is probably over
150,000 each year going abroad or to adjoining countries expecting to
return.
Besides this temporary emigration there is an equally large permanent
emigration. This is of two kinds, almost as entirely distinct from each
other as the emigration from two separate nations. The North Italian is
an educated, skilled artisan, coming from a manufacturing section and
largely from the cities. He is Teutonic in blood and appearance. The
South Italian is an illiterate peasant from the great landed estates,
with wages less than one-third his northern compatriot. He descends with
less mixture from the ancient inhabitants of Italy. Unhappily for us,
the North Italians do not come to the United States in considerable
numbers, but they betake themselves to Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil in
about the same numbers as the South Italians come to us. It is estimated
that in those three countries there are 3,000,000 Italians in a total
population of 23,000,000, and they are mainly derived from the north of
Italy. Surrounded by the unenterprising Spanish and Portuguese, they
have shown themselves to be the industrial leaders of the country. Some
of the chief buildings, banks, flour mills, textile mills, and a
majority of the wheat farms of Argentina belong to Italians. They are
one-third of the population of Buenos Ayres and own one-half of the
commercial capital of that city. They become lawyers, engineers, members
of parliament, and an Italian by descent has been president of the
Republic of Argentina, while other Italians have been ministers of war
and education.[48] While these North Italians, with their enterprise,
intelligence, and varied capacities, go to South America, we receive
the South Italians, who are nearly the most illiterate of all immigrants
at the present time, the most subservient to superiors, the lowest in
their standards of living, and at the same time the most industrious and
thrifty of all common laborers.
[Illustration: ALIENS AWAITING ADMISSION AT ELLIS ISLAND]
=Austria-Hungary.=--Next to that from Italy the immigration from the
Austro-Hungarian Empire in recent decades has reached the largest
dimensions. While Italy sent 273,000 people in 1906, Austria-Hungary
sent 265,000 in that year and 276,000 the year before. Like the
immigration from Italy, this increase has occurred since 1880. Prior to
that date the largest number reported from Austria-Hungary was 9000 in
1874.
While these figures compare with those of the Italians, yet, unlike the
Italians, they refer to a congeries of races and languages distinct one
from another. The significance of Austro-Hungarian immigration is
revealed only when we analyze it by races. The race map of this empire
shows at once the most complicated social mosaic of all modern nations.
Here we see, not that mixture of races and assimilation of language
which in our own country has evolved a vigorous, united people, but a
juxtaposition of hostile races and a fixity of language held together
only by the outside pressure of Russia, Germany, Italy, and Turkey. This
conflict of races has made the politics of the empire nearly
incomprehensible to foreigners, and has aggravated the economic
inequalities which drive the unprivileged masses to emigrate.
Not only are there in Austria-Hungary five grand divisions of the human
family,--the German, the Slav, the Magyar, the Latin, and the Jew,--but
these are again subdivided. In the northern mountainous and hilly
sections are 13,000,000 Slavic peoples, the Czechs, or Bohemians, with
their closely related Moravians, and the Slavic Slovaks, Poles, and
Ruthenians (known also as Russniaks); while in the southern hills and
along the Adriatic are another 4,000,000 Slavs, the Croatians, Servians,
Dalmatians, and Slovenians. Between these divisions on the fertile
plains 8,000,000 Magyars and 10,000,000 Germans have thrust themselves
as the dominant races. To the southwest are nearly a million Italians,
and in the east 2,500,000 Latinized Slavs, the Roumanians. The Slavs are
in general the conquered peoples, with a German and Magyar nobility
owning their land, making their laws, and managing their administration.
The northern Slavs are subject to Austria and Hungary, and the
Ruthenians suffer a double subjection, for they were the serfs of their
fellow-Slavs, the Poles, whom they continue to hate, and in whose
longings for a reunited Poland they do not participate. The southern
Slavs and Roumanians are subject to Hungary. The Roumanians are a
widespread and disrupted nationality of Slavs, conquered by the Romans,
from whom they imperfectly took their language, but now distributed
partly in independent kingdoms and partly under the dominion of the
Magyars. The Croatians from the southwest mountains are among the finest
specimens of physical manhood coming to our shores. They are a vigorous
people, hating Hungary which owns them and calling themselves
"Austrians" to ward off the name "Hun," by which Americans mistakenly
designate them. The Magyars are the Asiactic conquerors who overran
Europe ten centuries ago, and being repulsed by the Teutons to the west
established themselves on the Slavs in the valley and plains of the
Danube. Boasting a republican constitution a thousand years old they
have not until the past year been compelled to share it with the people
whom they subdued. Astute politicians and dashing military leaders, they
are as careless in business as the Slavs, and the supremacy which they
maintained in politics has slipped into the hands of the Jews in
economics. In no other modern country has the Jew been so liberally
treated, and in no other country have public and private finance come
more completely under his control. Profiting by the Magyars' suppression
of the Slavs, the Jew has monopolized the business opportunities denied
to the Slovak and the Croatian, and with this leverage has quietly
elbowed out the Magyar himself. No longer is the Magyar the dominant
race, and in the past year he has contributed to America more immigrants
than any branch of his conquered Slavs. In the Austrian dominions of
former Poland the Jew likewise has become the financier, and both the
Ruthenian and the Pole, unable to rise under their burden of debt,
contribute their more enterprising peasants to America.
By a perverse system of representative government, based on
representation of classes both in Austria and in Hungary, the great
landowners and wealthy merchants have heretofore elected three-fourths
of the parliaments, but recently in both countries the emperor has
granted universal manhood suffrage. The peasant Slavs will henceforth be
on equal footing with the German, the Magyar, and the Jew, and whether
out of the belated equality of races there will come equality of
economic opportunity remains to be seen. For the past few years the
emigration from the unfortunate dual empire has amazingly increased.
With all of this confusing medley of races, with this diversity of Greek
and Roman Catholicism and Judaism, with this history of race oppression
and hatred, it is not surprising that the immigrants should break out
into factions and feuds wherever thrown together among us. It is the
task of America to lift them to a patriotism which hitherto in their
native land they could not know.
The earliest migration from Austria-Hungary was that of the Bohemians,
the most highly educated and ardently patriotic of the Slavic people.
After the revolution of 1848, when the Germans suppressed their
patriotic uprising, students, professional men, and well-to-do peasants
came to America and settled in New York, St. Louis, Milwaukee, Chicago,
and in the rural districts of Texas, Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, and
California. Again, after the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, skilled
laborers were added to the stream, and they captured a large part of the
cigar-making industry of New York and the clothing trade of Chicago.
Latterly recruits from the peasants and unskilled laborers sought the
sections where the pioneers had located, learned the same trades, or
joined the armies of common labor. In Chicago the Bohemian section is
almost a self-governing city, with its own language, industries,
schools, churches, and newspapers. After a slight decline there is again
an increasing flow of immigrants, the number in 1906 being 13,000. Those
who come bring their families, and few return. In these earlier days the
Polish and Hungarian Jews also began their migration, following the
steps of their German precursors.
In the decade of the eighties the increase of immigration from
Austria-Hungary was first that of the Poles, now numbering 44,000, then
the Magyars, now 43,000, then the Slovaks, now 37,000. In the latter
part of the nineties the Southern Slavs--Croatians and Slovenians--suddenly
took up their burden, and 43,000 of them came in 1906. Following them
came the Ruthenians from the North, numbering 16,000 in 1906. Last of
all, the Latinized Slavs, the Roumanians, began their flight from the
Magyar, to the number of less than 400 in the year 1900, but swelling
to 11,000 in 1906. Only 300 additional came from their own proper
kingdom--Roumania. During all this period there has been also a
considerable migration of Germans, reaching 35,000 in 1906.
In the face of this swollen migration the Hungarian government has at
last taken alarm. They see even their own people, the Magyars, escaping.
Recently the government has attempted to restrict the unrest by
prohibiting advertisements or public speeches advocating emigration, by
prohibiting the sale of tickets or solicitation by any one not holding a
government license for the purpose, by contracting with a steamship line
from their own Adriatic part of Fiume in order to reduce migration
across the German and Italian frontiers. This may account for the
decline of ten thousand immigrants from Austria-Hungary in 1906.
Practically the entire migration of the Slavic elements at the present
time is that of peasants. In Croatia the forests have been depleted, and
thousands of immigrant wood-choppers have sought the forests of our
South and the railway construction of the West. The natural resources of
Croatia are by no means inadequate, but the discriminating taxes and
railway freight rates imposed by Hungary have prevented the development
of these resources. The needed railways are not obtainable for the
development of the mines and minerals of Croatia, and the peasants,
unable to find employment at home, are allured by the advertisements of
American steamships and the agents of American contractors.
So it is with the Slovak peasants and mine workers of the northern
mountains and foothills. With agricultural wages only eighteen cents a
day, they find employment in the American mines, rolling-mills,
stock-yards, and railroad construction at $1.50 a day.
In addition to race discrimination, the blight of Austria-Hungary is
landlordism. Considerable reforms, indeed, have been made in certain
sections. The free alienation of landed property was adopted in the
Austrian dominions in 1869, and in the following twelve years 42,000 new
holdings were carved out of the existing peasant proprietorships in
Bohemia. Similar transfers have occurred elsewhere, but even where this
peasant ownership has gained, the enormous prices are an obstacle to
economic independence. They compel the land-owning peasant to content
himself with five to twelve acres, the size of four-fifths of the farms
in Galicia. His eagerness to own land is his dread of the mere
wage-earner's lot, which he no longer dreads when he lands in America.
"The fear of falling from the social position of a peasant to that,
immeasurably inferior, of a day laborer, is the great spur which drives
over the seas alike the Slovak, the Pole, and the Ruthenian."[49] These
high rentals and fabulous values can exist only where wages and
standards of living are at the bare subsistence level, leaving a heavy
surplus for capitalization. They also exist as a result of most
economical and minute cultivation, so that, with this training, the
Bohemian or Polish farmer who takes up land in America soon becomes a
well-to-do citizen.
Taxation, too, is unequal. For many years the government suffered
deficits, the military expenses increased, and worst of all, the
nobility were exempt from taxation. The latter injustice, however, was
remedied by the revolution of 1848, and yet at the present time the
great landowners pay much less than their proportionate share of the
land-tax, to say nothing of the heavy taxes on consumption and industry.
As in other countries of low standards, the number of births is large in
proportion to the inhabitants. For every one thousand persons in
Hungary, there are forty-three births each year,[50] a number exceeded
by but one great country of Europe, Russia. Yet, with this large number
of births, because the economic conditions are so onerous and the
consequent deaths so frequent, the net increase is less than that of any
other country except France. In Austria the births and deaths are less
and the net increase greater, and they run close to those of prolific
Italy.
In each of these countries the figures for births and deaths stand near
those of the negroes in America, and like the negroes, two-fifths of the
mortality is that of children under five years of age, whereas with
other more favored countries and races this proportion is only one-fifth
or one-fourth. It is not so much the overpopulation of Austria-Hungary
that incites emigration as it is the poverty, ignorance, inequality, and
helplessness that produce a seeming overpopulation. While these
conditions continue, emigration will continue to increase, and the
efforts of the Hungarian government to reduce it will not succeed.
=Russia.=--The Russian Empire is at the present time the third in the rank
of contributors to American immigration. Russian immigration, like that
of Italy and Austria-Hungary, is practically limited to the past two
decades. In 1881 it first reached 10,000. In 1893 it was 42,000, and in
1906, 216,000.
The significant fact of this immigration is that it is only 2 per cent
Russian and 98 per cent non-Russian. The Russian peasant is probably the
most oppressed of the peasants of Europe, and though his recent uprising
has aroused his intellect and disabused the former opinion of his
stupidity, yet he has been so tied to the soil by his system of
communism, his burden of taxes and debt and his subjection to landlords,
that he is as yet immune to the fever of migration. In so far as he has
moved from his native soil he has done so through the efforts of a
despotic government to Russianize Siberia and the newly conquered
regions of his own vast domain. On the other hand, the races which have
abandoned the Russian Empire have been driven forth because they refused
to submit to the policy which would by force assimilate them to the
language or religion of the dominant race. Even the promises of the
aristocracy under the fright of recent revolution have not mitigated the
persecutions, and the number taking refuge in flight has doubled in four
years. Foremost are the Jews, 125,000 in 1906, an increase from 37,000
four years ago; next the Poles, 46,000 in 1906; next 14,000 Lithuanians,
13,000 Finns, and 10,000 Germans. The Poles and Lithuanians are Slavic
peoples long since conquered and annexed by the Russians. The Finns are
a Teutonic people with a Mongol language; the Germans are an isolated
branch of that race settled far to the east on the Volga River by
invitation of the Czar more than one hundred years ago, or on the Baltic
provinces adjoining Germany; while the Jews are the unhappy descendants
of a race whom the Russians found in territory conquered during the past
two centuries.
=The Jews.=--Russia, at present, sends us five-sixths of the Jewish
immigration, but the other one-sixth comes from adjoining territory in
Austria-Hungary and Roumania. About six thousand temporarily sojourn in
England, and the Whitechapel district of East London is a reduced
picture of the East Side, New York. During American history Jews have
come hither from all countries of Europe. The first recorded immigration
was that of Dutch Jews, driven from Brazil by the Portuguese and
received by the Dutch government of New Amsterdam. The descendants of
these earliest immigrants continue at the present time in their own
peculiar congregation in lower New York City. Quite a large number of
Portuguese and Spanish Jews, expelled from those countries in the time
of Columbus, have contributed their descendants to America by way of
Holland. The German Jews began their migration in small numbers during
colonial times, but their greatest influx followed the Napoleonic wars
and reached its height at the middle of the century. Prior to the last
two decades so predominant were the German Jews that, to the ordinary
American, all Jews were Germans. Strangely enough, the so-called Russian
Jew is also a German, and in Russia among the masses of people the words
"German" and "Jew" also mean the same thing. Hereby hangs a tale of
interest in the history of this persecuted race. Jews are known to have
settled at the site of the present city of Frankfort in Southern Germany
as early as the third century, when that town was a trading post on the
Roman frontier. At the present time the region about Frankfort,
extending south through Alsace, contains the major part of the German
and French Jews. To this centre they flocked during the Middle Ages, and
their toleration in this region throws an interesting light on the
reasons for their persecution in other countries.
Under the Catholic polity following the crusades the Jew had no rights,
and he could therefore gain protection only through the personal favor
of emperor, king, or feudal lord. This protection was arbitrary and
capricious, but it was always based on a pecuniary consideration.
Unwittingly the Catholic Church, by its prohibition of usury to all
believers, had thrown the business of money lending into the hands of
the Jews, and since the Jew was neither inclined toward agriculture nor
permitted to follow that vocation, his only sources of livelihood were
trade and usury. The sovereigns of Europe who protected the Jews did so
in view of the large sums which they could exact from their profits as
usurers and traders. They utilized the Jews like sponges to draw from
their subjects illicit taxes. When, therefore, the people gained power
over their sovereigns, and the spirit of nationality arose, the Jew,
without his former protector, was the object of persecution. England was
the first country where this spirit of nationality emerged and the first
to expel the Jews (1290); France followed a century later (1395); and
Spain and Portugal two centuries later (1492 and 1495). But in Germany
and other parts of the Holy Roman Empire political confusion and anarchy
prevailed, and the emperor and petty sovereigns were able to continue
their protection of the Jews.
[Illustration: NORWEGIAN ITALIAN ARABIC (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.
[Illustration: 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 mediaeval 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 proteges.... 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
INDUSTRY
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]
===============+========+=========+==================+==========================
| | SEXES | AGES | OCCUPATIONS[65]
| +----+----+-----+-----+-----+-------+----+----+----+----
| TOTAL, | | | | | | TOTAL,|Professional
RACE OR PEOPLE | 100 | | |Under|14-45|Over | 100 | |Commercial
|PER CENT| M | F | 14 |years| 45 | PER | | |Skilled
| | | |years| |years| CENT | | | |Unskilled
---------------+--------+----+----+-----+-----+-----+-------+----+----+----+----
African (black)| 3,786|62.2|37.8| 9.1| 86.8| 4.1| 2,921| 3.0| 2.6|45.6|48.8
Armenian | 1,895|75.1|24.9| 11.8| 84.3| 3.9| 1,390| 3.4| 5.1|38.5|53.0
Bohemian and | | | | | | | | | | |
Moravian | 12,958|57.3|42.8| 20.7| 73.9| 5.4| 7,985| 1.3| 1.2|43.6|53.9
Bulgarian, | | | | | | | | | | |
Servian, and | | | | | | | | | | |
Montenegrin | 11,548|96.2| 3.8| 1.9| 96.2| 1.9| 11,025| 0.1| 0.3| 3.7|95.9
Chinese | 1,485|94.1| 5.9| 4.5| 81.5| 14.0| 1,261| 6.9|66.0| 1.5|25.6
Croatian and | | | | | | | | | | |
Slovenian | 44,272|86.5|13.5| 3.8| 94.1| 2.1| 40,125| 0.1| 0.1| 3.7|96.1
Cuban | 5,591|67.4|32.6| 17.2| 73.2| 9.6| 2,842|10.3|19.1|55.9|14.7
Dalmatian, | | | | | | | | | | |
Bosnian, and | | | | | | | | | | |
Herzegovinian| 4,568|95.1| 4.9| 1.7| 96.3| 2.0| 4,373| 0.1| 0.3| 7.7|91.9
Dutch and | | | | | | | | | | |
Flemish | 9,735|67.0|33.0| 17.6| 76.4| 6.0| 5,849| 5.2| 7.9|30.1|56.8
East Indian | 271|93.0| 7.0| 5.5| 90.5| 4.0| 222| 9.9|52.7| 5.4|32.0
English | 45,079|62.1|37.9| 13.5| 75.3| 11.2| 28,249|10.8|13.5|51.3|24.4
Finnish | 14,136|67.4|32.6| 7.1| 90.8| 2.1| 11,959| 0.4| 0.3| 7.2|92.1
French | 10,379|57.1|42.9| 8.6| 81.7| 9.7| 6,823|16.5|12.9|31.3|39.3
German | 86,813|59.2|40.8| 15.1| 78.6| 6.3| 55,095| 4.3| 6.7|29.7|59.3
Greek | 23,127|96.3| 3.7| 3.1| 95.9| 1.0| 21,615| 0.5| 2.6| 9.4|87.5
Hebrew | 153,748|52.1|47.9| 28.3| 66.3| 5.4| 76,605| 1.4| 5.6|66.7|26.3
Irish | 40,959|50.9|49.1| 4.6| 90.9| 4.5| 35,387| 1.7| 2.9|15.1|80.3
Italian (North)| 46,286|78.9|21.1| 8.6| 87.9| 3.5| 36,980| 1.4| 2.3|19.4|76.9
Italian (South)| 240,528|79.4|20.6| 11.1| 84.3| 4.6|190,105| 0.4| 1.3|16.0|82.3
Japanese | 14,243|89.6|10.4| 1.0| 97.1| 1.9| 11,797| 2.2|10.3| 2.8|84.7
Korean | 127|81.1|18.9| 16.5| 81.1| 2.4| 80| 6.3|15.0| 2.5|76.2
Lithuanian | 14,257|66.1|33.9| 8.9| 89.5| 1.6| 11,568| 0.2| 0.2| 9.2|90.4
Magyar | 44,261|71.8|28.2| 9.0| 87.5| 3.5| 34,559| 0.6| 0.5| 9.3|89.6
Mexican | 141|66.0|34.0| 14.9| 74.5| 10.6| 65|23.1|35.4|24.6|16.9
Pacific | | | | | | | | | | |
Islander | 13|76.9|23.1| 7.7| 76.9| 15.4| 9|33.3| 0.0|66.7| 0.0
Polish | 95,835|69.3|30.7| 9.3| 88.5| 2.2| 77,437| 0.2| 0.2| 7.7|91.9
Portuguese | 8,729|58.4|41.6| 20.9| 70.7| 8.4| 5,815| 0.5| 1.1| 4.8|93.6
Roumanian | 11,425|92.5| 7.5| 2.0| 94.0| 4.0| 10,759| 0.2| 0.2| 2.5|97.1
Russian | 5,814|81.7|18.3| 10.0| 86.8| 3.2| 4,591| 3.2| 2.4|10.8|83.6
Ruthenian | 16,257|75.7|24.3| 3.6| 93.9| 2.5| 14,899| 0.1|[66]| 2.7|97.2
Scandinavian | 58,141|62.1|37.9| 9.1| 86.4| 4.5| 47,352| 1.8| 1.6|23.5|73.1
Scotch | 16,463|66.1|33.9| 12.9| 78.8| 8.3| 11,207| 5.7| 9.9|62.8|21.6
Slovak | 38,221|69.6|30.4| 8.9| 88.4| 2.7| 29,817|[66]| 0.1| 4.9|95.0
Spanish | 5,332|83.6|16.4| 7.1| 84.6| 8.3| 4,211| 5.7|19.2|44.4|30.7
Spanish | | | | | | | | | | |
American | 1,585|69.7|30.3| 17.0| 74.4| 8.6| 790|23.7|37.1|21.1|18.1
Syrian | 5,824|70.4|29.6| 15.2| 80.9| 3.9| 4,023| 1.1|11.1|19.9|67.9
Turkish | 2,033|95.7| 4.3| 1.9| 96.0| 2.1| 1,914| 1.5| 4.4| 8.3|85.8
Welsh | 2,367| 7.1|29.9| 12.5| 78.2| 9.3| 1,639| 4.9| 6.7|62.4|26.0
West Indian | | | | | | | | | | |
(except | | | | | | | | | | |
Cuban) | 1,476|58.9|41.1| 14.8| 76.1| 9.1| 900| 7.6|15.0|49.4|28.0
Other Peoples | 1,027|94.5| 5.5| 2.6| 96.0| 1.4| 932| 1.2| 4.1|18.0|76.7
---------+----+----+-----+-----+-----+-------+----+----+----+----
Total 1,100,735|69.5|30.5| 12.4| 83.0| 4.6|815,275| 1.8| 3.1|21.7|73.4
===============+========+====+====+=====+=====+=====+=======+====+====+====+====
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.
[Illustration: AGE GROUPS, FOREIGN AND NATIVE-BORN]
=Immigration and Wealth Production.=--Over four-fifths of the immigrants
are in the prime of life--the ages between fourteen and forty-five. In
the year 1906 only 12 out of every 100 were under fourteen years of age,
and only 4.5 out of every 100 over forty-five years of age. The census
of 1900 offers some interesting comparisons between the native-born and
the foreign-born in this matter of age distribution. It shows quite
plainly that a large proportion of the native-born population is below
the age of industrial production, fully 39 per cent, or two-fifths,
being under fifteen years of age, while only 5 per cent of the
foreign-born are of corresponding ages. On the other hand, the ages
fifteen to forty-four include 46 per cent of the native and 58 per cent
of the foreign-born. This is shown in the diagram based on five-year age
periods. The native born are seen to group themselves in a symmetrical
pyramid, with the children under five as the wide foundation, gradually
tapering to the ages of eighty and eighty-four, but for the foreign-born
they show a double pyramid, tapering in both directions from the ages of
thirty-five to thirty-nine, which include the largest five-year group.
Thus, immigration brings to us a population of working ages unhampered
by unproductive mouths to be fed, and, if we consider alone that which
produces the wealth of this country and not that which consumes it, the
immigrants add more to the country than does the same number of native
of equal ability. Their home countries have borne the expense of rearing
them up to the industrial period of their lives, and then America,
without that heavy expense, reaps whatever profits there are on the
investment.
[Illustration: PROPORTION OF SEXES. NATIVE AND FOREIGN-BORN WHITES,
1900, AND IMMIGRANTS 1906]
In another respect does immigration add to our industrial population
more than would be done by an equal increase in native population,
namely, by the large excess of men over women. In 1906, over two-thirds
of the immigrants were males and less than one-third were females. This
is shown on the accompanying diagram, as well as the fact based on the
census statistics that among the foreign-born the men predominate over
the women in the ratio of 540 to 460, while among the native-born
population the sexes are about equal, being in the proportion of 507
males to 493 females.
This small proportion of women and children shows, of course, that it is
the workers, not the families, who seek America. Yet the proportions
widely vary for different nationalities. Among the Jews 48 per cent are
females and 28 per cent children. This persecuted race moves in a body,
expecting to make America its home. At the other extreme the Greeks send
only 4 per cent females and 3 per cent children, the Croatians 13 per
cent females and 4 per cent children, the South Italians 21 per cent
females and 11 per cent children. These are races whose immigration has
only recently begun, and naturally enough the women and children, except
in the case of the Jews, do not accompany the workmen. A race of longer
migration, like the Germans, has 41 per cent females and 15 per cent
children. The Irish have a peculiar position. Alone of all the races do
the women equal the men, but only 5 per cent are children. Irish girls
seeking domestic service explain this preponderance of women.
Significant and interesting facts regarding other races may be seen by
studying the table entitled "Industrial Relations of Immigrants."
[Illustration: SWEDEN GREECE GERMANY RUSSIA CHINA SCOTLAND AUSTRIA
AUSTRALIA CANADA ENGLAND ITALY ROUMANIA AMERICAN SCHOOL BOYS (From
_World's Work_)]
Such being the proportions of industrial energy furnished by
immigration, what is the quality? Much the larger proportion of
immigrants are classed as unskilled, including laborers and servants.
Omitting those who have "no occupation," including mainly women and
children, who are 30.5 per cent of the total, only 21.7 per cent of the
remainder who are working immigrants are skilled, and 73.4 per cent are
unskilled. The proportions vary greatly among the different races. The
largest element of skilled labor is among the Jews, a city people,
two-thirds of whom are skilled workmen. Nearly the same proportion of
the Scotch and Welsh and over one-half of the English and Bohemians are
skilled mechanics. Nearly one-third of the Germans and Dutch are
skilled, and one-fourth of the Scandinavians. At the other extreme, only
3 to 5 per cent of the Ruthenians, Croatians, Roumanians, and Slovaks
are skilled, and 8 to 10 per cent of the Magyars, Lithuanians, and
Poles. One-fifth of the North Italians and one-sixth of the South
Italians are skilled. These and other proportions are shown in the
statistical table.
The skilled labor which comes to America, especially from Northern and
Western Europe, occupies a peculiar position in our industries. In the
first place, the most capable workmen have permanent places at home,
and it is, in general, only those who cannot command situations who seek
their fortunes abroad. The exceptions to this rule are in the beginnings
of an industry like that of tin plate, when a large proportion of the
industry moved bodily to America, and the highly skilled tin workers of
Wales brought a kind of industrial ability that had not hitherto existed
in this country. As for the bulk of skilled immigrants, they do not
represent the highest skill of the countries whence they come.
On the other hand, the European skilled workman is usually better
trained than the American, and in many branches of industry, especially
machinery and ship-building, the English and Scotch immigrants command
those superior positions where an all-round training is required.
This peculiar situation is caused by the highly specialized character of
American industry. In no country has division of labor and machinery
been carried as far as here. By division of labor the skilled trades
have been split up into simple operations, each of which in itself
requires little or no skill, and the boy who starts in as a beginner is
kept at one operation so that he does not learn a trade. The old-time
journeyman tailor was a skilled mechanic who measured his customer, cut
the cloth and trimmings, basted, sewed, and pressed the suit. Now we
have factories which make only coats, others which make only vests,
others trousers, and there are children's knee-pants factories and even
ladies' tailor establishments where the former seamstress sees her
precious skill dissipated among a score of unskilled workers. Thus the
journeyman tailor is displaced by the factory, where the coat passes
through the hands of thirty to fifty different men and women, each of
whom can learn his peculiar operation in a month or two. The same is
true in greater or less degree in all industries. Even in the building
trades in the larger cities there are as many kinds of bricklayers as
there are kinds of walls to be built, and as many kinds of carpenters as
there are varieties of woodwork.
So it is with machinery. The American employer does not advertise for a
"machinist"--he wants a "lathe hand" or a "drill-press hand," and the
majority of his "hands" are perhaps only automatic machine tenders. The
employer cannot afford to transfer these hands from one job to another
to enable them to "learn the trade." He must keep them at one operation,
for it is not so much skill that he wants as cheap labor and speed.
Consequently, American industry is not producing all-round mechanics,
and the employers look to Europe for their skilled artisans. In England
the trade-unions have made it their special business to see that every
apprentice learns every part of his trade, and they have prevented
employers from splitting up the trades and specializing machinery and
thereby transforming the mechanic into the "hand." Were it not for
immigration, American industries would ere now have been compelled to
give more attention to apprenticeship and the training of competent
mechanics. The need of apprenticeship and trade schools is being more
seriously felt every year, for, notwithstanding the progress of division
of labor and machinery, the all-round mechanic continues to play an
important part in the shop and factory. American trade-unions are
gaining strength, and one of their most insistent demands is the
protection of apprenticeship. The bricklayers' and carpenters' unions of
Chicago even secure from their employers instruction for apprentices in
school. Not much headway in this line, however, has yet been made, and
American industry has become abnormal, we might almost say suicidal, or
at any rate, non-self-supporting. By extreme division of labor and
marvellous application of machinery it makes possible the wholesale
employment in factories of the farm laborers of Europe and their
children, and then depends on Europe for the better-trained types of the
skilled mechanic, who, on account of the farm laborer, have not been
able to learn their trade in America.
Not only does immigration bring to America the strongest, healthiest,
and most energetic and adventurous of the work-people of Europe and
Asia, but those who come work much harder than they did at home.
Migration tears a man away from the traditions, the routine, the social
props on which he has learned to rely, and throws him among strangers
upon his own resources. He must swim or drown. At the same time he
earns higher wages and eats more nourishing food than he had ever
thought within reach of one in his station. His ambition is fired, he is
stirred by the new tonic of feeling himself actually rising in the
world. He pictures to himself a home of his own, he economizes and saves
money to send to his friends and family, or to return to his beloved
land a person of importance. Watch a gang of Italians shovelling dirt
under an Irish boss, or a sweat-shop of Jewish tailors under a small
contractor, and you shall see such feverish production of wealth as an
American-born citizen would scarcely endure. Partly fear, partly hope,
make the fresh immigrant the hardest, if not the most intelligent,
worker in our industries.
=Industrial Capacities of Different Races.=--But, however hard one may
work, he can only exercise the gifts with which nature has endowed him.
Whether these gifts are contributed by race or by civilization, we shall
inquire when we come to the problems of amalgamation and assimilation.
At present we are concerned with the varying industrial gifts and
capacities of the various races as they actually exist at the time when
immigration, annexation, or conquest takes place.
The mental and moral qualities suited to make productive workers depend
upon the character of the industry. It is not conceivable that the
immigrants of the present day from Southern Europe and from Asia could
have succeeded as frontiersmen and pioneers in the settlement of the
country. In all Europe, Asia, and Africa there was but one race in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that had the preliminary training
necessary to plunge into the wilderness, and in the face of the Indian
to establish homes and agriculture. This was the English and the
Scotch-Irish. The Spaniards and the French were pioneers and
adventurers, but they established only trading stations. Accustomed to a
paternal government they had not, as a people, the self-reliance and
capacity for sustained exertion required to push forward as individuals,
and to cut themselves off from the support of a government across the
ocean. They shrank from the herculean task of clearing the forests,
planting crops among the stumps, and living miles away from their
neighbors. True, the pioneers had among their number several of German,
French, and Dutch descent, but these belonged to the second and third
generations descended from the immigrants and thrown from the time of
childhood among their English-Scotch neighbors. The French trappers and
explorers are famous, and have left their names on our map. But it was
the English race that established itself in America, not because it was
first to come, not because of its armies and navies, but because of its
agriculture. Every farm newly carved out of the wilderness became a
permanent foothold, and soon again sent out a continuous colony of sons
and daughters to occupy the fertile land. Based on this self-reliant,
democratic, industrial conquest of the new world the military conquest
naturally, inevitably followed.
But at the present day the character of industry has entirely changed.
The last quarter of the nineteenth century saw the vacant lands finally
occupied and the tribe of frontiersmen coming to an end. Population now
began to recoil upon the East and the cities. This afforded to
manufactures and to the mining industries the surplus labor-market so
necessary for the continuance of large establishments which to-day need
thousands of workmen and to-morrow hundreds. Mo
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