Favus, as you know, shockingly disfigures its victims, eating out the hair, producing disgusting scalp sores until cured, which is often deferred until the head is totally denuded of hair.
An examination at ports of embarkation almost invariably leads to a detection of this disease, and they who are afflicted with it are most likely to be set aside. That such has been the case there is little room for doubt, as you will observe, against ninety-six cases of favus for ten months last year only forty-four such cases are reported for the Montreal local office for the entire year, and only seven of these have been reported since January 1, 1903, a date coincident with the commencement of actual enforcement of the Canadian act aforementioned.
Another dangerous and dreaded disease, which is more difficult of detection, has not been marked by any such decrease; in fact, the very opposite result is shown. Even at the Montreal office, where the classes of immigrants applying for certificates of admission to the United States show such marked improvement over last year, there has been an increase in the number of trachoma cases.
Increases in trachomatous applicants elsewhere than at the Montreal office may be safely ascribed to the extended field of our operations and the increased force of inspectors assigned to duty at border stations. Practically no rejections were reported west of Port Huron last year, whereas the present year’s work furnishes a greater number of border rejections west of Port Huron than east of it.
The accompanying tabulated figures will suffice to inform you as to the classes rejected, showing the nationalities furnishing the greatest number of objectionables and the steamship lines carrying them.
Taken as a whole, without special explanatory references, the figures might easily be understood, hence the necessity for calling attention to certain features connected with these tables.
The figures given are for the whole year, but the latter half of the year is quite different from the former half. The former half may be said to have been quite normal, while the latter half represents a totally unprecedented condition in Canadian immigration.
The Provincial and Dominion governments have been exerting themselves most actively to induce immigration of the “fitter kind,” and so well have they succeeded that all shipping facilities have been utilized to their utmost capacity to accommodate agricultural settlers, principally for the Northwest, to the almost total exclusion of passengers from the continent of Europe.
The annual arrivals at Canadian ports since 1892 are as follows:
| Ocean ports only: | |
| 1892 | 27,898 |
| 1893 | 29,632 |
| 1894 | 20,829 |
| 1895 | 18,790 |
| 1896 | 16,835 |
| Total immigration: | |
| 1897 | 21,914 |
| 1898 | 31,900 |
| 1899 | 44,543 |
| 1900 (first six months) | 23,895 |
| 1900 | 49,149 |
| 1901–2 | 67,379 |
| 1902–3 (estimated) | 114,000 |