The pig and the goat have gone, and instead, the Irish have pianos and phonographs in their parlours; but in one generation, many Slavs and Italians, under less favourable conditions, have achieved the same results, minus the pig and goat period.
To-day, the merchants in Wilkes-Barre, Scranton, Connelsville and Pittsburg regard the Slav as a great “spender”; and if the Italian is not now like his predecessors, he soon will become so imbued by the American spirit, that, like us, he will live up to his income and beyond it.
That phase of the problem so much complained of, which relates to the immigrants’ sending the bulk of their earnings to Europe, would not be half so serious if we provided a safe banking system; preferably, Postal Savings Banks. Both the Austrian and Italian governments thus safeguard every penny which is sent abroad, and one cannot blame the toiler who prefers to trust his money to a government in whose financial soundness he has absolute confidence, rather than place it in our own savings institutions, in which we ourselves have but little confidence.
The economic problem as presented by the effect of immigration upon the labour market is made less serious by the fact that large numbers of those who come, go back and forth, according to the demand for the commodity which they supply.
During our last financial crisis, the sudden withdrawal from competition of half a million toilers, certainly rendered conditions less difficult than they would have been had we drawn for our supply upon those sources in Northern and Central Europe, which have always sent us their surplus population for permanent settlement. Those aspects of the present immigrant population, which are usually pointed out as its defects, have in a large measure helped to make the economic problem less acute; although they have aggravated some phases of it. Foremost among these is the ethnic problem.
Possibly because of the bitterness of the race question in the South, the American people have become very sensitive to ethnic differences. All those primitive instincts which were at work in the childhood of the race have risen to the surface and threaten to become permanent factors in our national character.
A little more or less pigment in the skin, the shape of a nose or the slant of the eyes, produce in the average American that most primitive of antagonisms—race prejudice.
Being a primitive instinct, it defies reason, the commandments of religion and the dictates of humanity. In fact, it often becomes irrational, irreligious and inhuman.
During the recent agitation of the Japanese question on the Coast, I discovered that no matter how far removed the ordinary American may be from the seat of the difficulty, the very agitation of the question acts contagiously upon the people of the East as well as of the West. As a result, their feelings towards the Japanese have unconsciously changed for the worse, so that the question has assumed in their minds the qualities and proportions of the Negro problem.
To justify its existence, this instinct, if such it is, overemphasizes ethnic differences and minimizes the superior qualities of the race or group involved. It always applies the categoric judgment when the judgment is adverse, and admits grudgingly that in each group or race there are certain individuals who possess good qualities.