RACES AND IMMIGRANTS IN AMERICA

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

ILLUSTRATIONS

REFERENCES CITED IN FOOTNOTES

“America’s Race Problems.” A series of discussions on indigenous race elements and the negro. American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. XVIII, No. 1 (1901).

Atlanta University Publications:—
No. 1. “Mortality among Negroes in Cities” (1896).
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. “Introductory,” Jan. 6; “Bohemians,” Feb. 3; “Slovaks,” March 3, April 7; “Galicia, Austrian Poles, Ruthenians,” May 5.

Bluntschli, J. K., The Theory of the State. New York, 1885.

Brandenburg, Broughton, Imported Americans (1904). Description of trip by author and wife through southern Italy and Sicily and return by steerage with immigrants.

Brinton, Daniel G., Religions of Primitive Peoples. New York, 1897.

Bureau of Labor, Seventh Special Report, The Slums of Baltimore, Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia (1894). Ninth Special Report, The Italians in Chicago (1897).

Burgess, John W., Reconstruction and the Constitution, 1866-1876. New York, 1903.

Bushee, Frederick A., “Ethnic Factors in the Population of Boston,” American Economic Association, 3d Series, Vol. IV, pp. 305-470 (1903).

Casson, Herbert N., Munsey’s Magazine, “The Jews in America,” 34:381; “The Sons of Old Scotland in America,” 34:599; “The Germans in America,” 34:694; “The Scandinavians in America,” 35:613; “The Welsh in America,” 35:749; “The Italians in America,” 35:122; “The Dutch in America,” 35:238; “The Spanish in America,” 35:294.

Coman, Katherine, “The History of Contract Labor in the Hawaiian Islands,” American Economic Association, 3d Series, Vol. IV, No. 3 (1903). “The Negro as Peasant Farmer,” American Statistical Association, June, 1904, pp. 39-54.

Commissioner of Education, Annual Reports, Washington.

Commissioner-General of Immigration, Annual Reports, Washington.

Commons, J. R., Proportional Representation. New York, 1907.

Cutler, James E., Lynch Law. An Investigation into the History of Lynching in the United States. New York, 1905.

De Forest and Veillier, The Tenement House Problem, 2 vols. New York, 1903.

Du Bois, W. E. B., The Philadelphia Negro. Philadelphia, 1899; The Soul of Black Folk. New York, 1903; “Negroes,” Twelfth Census, Supplementary Analysis, pp. 185-275; “The Negro Farmer,” pp. 511-579.

Eaton, Dorman B., The Civil Service in Great Britain. New York, 1880.

Emigration to the United States, Special Consular Reports, Vol. XXX. Department of Commerce and Labor, 1904.

Facts about Immigration. Reports of Conferences of the Immigration Department of the National Civic Federation, Sept. 14 and Dec. 12, 1906. 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.

Fiske, John, Old Virginia and her Neighbors, 2 vols. New York, 1897.

Fleming, Walter L., Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama. New York, 1897.

Franklin, F. J., The Legislative History of Naturalization in the United States. Chicago, 1906.

Grose, Howard B., Aliens or Americans? Forward Mission Study Courses. New York, 1906.

Hall, Prescott F., Immigration and its Effect upon the United States. New York, 1906.

Hampton Negro Conference, Annual, 1897-1901.

Hanna, Charles A., The Scotch-Irish, 2 vols. New York, 1902.

Hawaii, Reports on, United States Bureau of Labor, 1st Report, Sen. Doc. 169, 57th Congress, 1st Sess., 13:4231; 2d Report, Bulletin No. 47 (1903); 3d Report, Bulletin No. 66 (1906).

Hoffman, Frederick L., “Race Traits and Tendencies of the American 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.

King and Okey, Italy To-day. London, 1901.

Kuczynski, R., “The Fecundity of the Native and Foreign Born Population in Massachusetts,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, November, 1901, February, 1902. “Die Einwanderungspolitik und die Bevölkerungsfrage 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).

Lodge, Henry Cabot, Historical and Political Essays. Boston, 1892.

Lord, Trenor, and Barrows, The Italian in America. New York, 1905. Especially Italians in American agriculture.

Mallock, W. H., Aristocracy and Evolution. New York, 1898.

Marshall, Alfred, Principles of Economics. New York, 1891.

Merriam, G. S., The Negro and the Nation. New York, 1906.

Muirhead, James F., The Land of Contrasts. London and New York, 1900.

Münsterberg, Hugo, American Traits. New York, 1902.

Naturalization, Report to the President of the Commission on. Submitted Nov. 8, 1905, 59th Cong., 1st Sess., H. R. Doc. 46.

Negro. Series of Articles on the Reconstruction Period, Atlantic Monthly. “The Reconstruction of the Southern States,” Woodrow Wilson, 87:1; “The Conditions of the Reconstruction Problem,” Hilary A. Herbert, 87:145; “The Freedman’s Bureau,” W. E. B. Du Bois, 87:354; “Reconstruction in South Carolina,” Daniel H. Chamberlain, 87:473; “The Ku-Klux Movement,” William G. Brown, 87:634; “Washington during Reconstruction,” S. W. McCall, 87:817; “Reconstruction and Disfranchisement,” Editors, 88:31; “New Orleans and Reconstruction,” Albert Phelps, 88:121; “The Southern People during Reconstruction,” Thomas Nelson Page, 88:289; “The Undoing of Reconstruction,” William A. Dunning, 88:437.

United States Bureau of Labor, Bulletin No. 22, “The Negro in the Black Belt”; No. 32, “The Negroes of Sandy Spring, Maryland”; No. 35, “The Negro Landholder of Georgia”; No. 37, “The Negroes of Litwalton, Virginia”; No. 38, “Negroes of Cinclare Central Factory and Calumet Plantation, Louisiana”; No. 48, “The Negroes of Xenia, Ohio.”

“Negroes, Social Interests of, in Northern Cities.” Charities, special number, Oct. 7, 1905.

Ripley, W. Z., The Races of Europe. New York, 1899.

Roosevelt, Theodore, The Winning of the West, 4 vols. New York, 1889-1894.

Rosenberg, Edward, “Chinese Workers in China,” “Filipinos as Workmen,” “Labor Conditions in Hawaii,” American Federationist, August, October, December, 1905.

Ross, Edward A., “The Causes of Race Superiority,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, July, 1901, pp. 67-89. The notable address in which the term “race suicide” was coined.

Rowe, Leo S., The United States and Porto Rico. New York, 1904.

Semple, Ellen Churchill, American History and its Geographic Conditions. New York, 1903. “The Anglo-Saxons of the Kentucky Mountains: A Study in Anthropogeography,” Geographical Journal, 17:588 (1901).

Slav in America, The, Charities, December, 1904. Descriptive articles by representatives of the several Slav nationalities.

Smith, R. M., Emigration and Immigration. New York, 1890. “Assimilation of Nationalities in the United States,” Political Science Quarterly, Vol. IX, pp. 426-444, 650-670 (1894).

Stewart, Ethelbert, “Influence of Trade Unions on Immigrants,” Bureau of Labor, Bulletin No. 56.

Stone, A. H., “The Negro in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta,” American Economic Association, 3d Series, Vol. III, pp. 235-278 (1901). “The Mulatto Factor in the Race Problem,” Atlantic Monthly, May, 1903. “A Plantation Experiment,” Quarterly Journal Economics, 19:270 (1905). “The Italian Cotton Grower: The Negro’s Problem,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 4:45 (1905).

Suffrage, Suppression of the. Report of the Committee on Political Reform of the Union League Club. New York, 1903.

Thomas, W. H., The American Negro, 1901.

Tillinghast, Joseph A., “The Negro in Africa and America,” American Economic Association, 3d Series, Vol. III, No. 2 (1902).

Van Vorst, Mrs. John and Marie, The Woman who Toils. New York, 1903. Contains introduction by President Roosevelt.

Walker, Francis A., Discussions in Economics and Statistics, 2 vols., 1897.

Ward, Robert De C., “Sane Methods of Regulating Immigration,” Review of Reviews, March, 1906.

Warne, Frank Julian, The Slav Invasion and the Mine Workers, 1904.

Washington, Booker T., The Future of the American Negro, 1900. Up from Slavery, 1901.

Watson, Elkanah, Men and Times of the Revolution. Edited by his son, Winslow C. Watson, 2d edition. New York, 1861.

Welfare Work, Conference on, National Civic Federation. New York, 1904.

Whelpley, James D., The Problem of the Immigrant, 1905. Emigration laws of European countries and immigration laws of British Colonies and the United States.

Woods, R. A., The City Wilderness, 1898. Americans in Process, 1902.

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 coöperation, 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, coöperation. 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 archæology 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

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.

“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.”

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 coöperation. 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 coöperation. 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.

Coöperation is the third and capital equipment for attaining the rights of citizenship. There are two forms of coöperation—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 coöperation 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.

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 coöperation 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 coöperation 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 coöperation 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.

[Larger Image]

Movement of Immigrants, Imports of Merchandise per capita, and Immigrants per 10,000 Population—1800 to 1906.

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.”

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

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.

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.

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.

Slav Jewish Polack Lithuanian
(From The Home Missionary)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER V

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]

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.