For a generation after the establishment of Free Trade England enjoyed an unparalleled prosperity—an unchallenged commercial and industrial supremacy. The British flag commanded the seas over which British fleets carried the products of British labour to the four corners of the earth, and the British traveller abroad made himself unpopular and ridiculous by patronising Mont Blanc and by looking superciliously down upon all who had not the good fortune to be born British. Those were the proud days in which Lord Palmerston described Prussia as a country of “d——d professors,” and Matthew Arnold wrote his parable of the young Englishman and the upset perambulator.
But this undisputed sovereignty could not last for ever. Europe recovered from the devastating cataclysm which had left England alone unscathed. The heaps of ruins with which the Napoleonic wars had strewn the Continent were replaced by new edifices. Young states arose out of the ashes of the old ones, and a new life chased away the shadows of death. All these renovated countries, having once set their houses in comparative order, began to look abroad for expansion. Germany proved with marvellous quickness that she could produce other things than “d——d professors”; France likewise; not to mention the smaller countries of Belgium, Holland, Denmark, and Switzerland. On the other side of the Atlantic also the American Republic emerged from the ordeal of her Civil War with renewed vigour, which soon displayed itself in commercial and industrial activity. The upshot of this perfectly natural revolution was that England found herself degraded from an autocratic mistress of the world’s trade to the position of one among many competitors. We saw with surprise and dismay that we were no longer the models and the despair of others. Then our Olympian complacency gave place to nervous anxiety, and our arrogant self-sufficiency was succeeded by serious scepticism concerning the titles on which our former estimate of ourselves rested. We ceased to brag of our own “unparalleled progress,” and began to watch more and more carefully the progress achieved by others. We acquired the habit of asking ourselves how is it that the monopoly which we had foolishly regarded as our inalienable birthright was slipping from our hands; whence sprang this rapid development of countries which until the last half-century were in their commercial and industrial infancy; how came it to pass that nations which until yesterday were content to copy us slavishly or to admire us passively are to-day rivalling us so successfully? This inquiry led to the discovery that the foreigner’s progress arose from superior intelligence, better education, greater adaptability, and other advantages of a similar nature. We came to the conclusion that, unless we rouse ourselves to strenuous exertion, we shall be left behind in the race. This conviction has already found a most laudable expression in the earnest efforts made in every part of England to revise and to improve our commercial and industrial methods and by special education to qualify ourselves for the struggle under the new conditions. So far our loss of the monopoly has proved a blessing in disguise, for it has aroused that spirit of manly emulation to which undisputed supremacy is fatal. But, unfortunately, the same consciousness of our altered position relatively to the rest of the world has also aroused a spirit of an entirely different kind. Many among us—too intelligent to ignore the changed state of things, not intelligent enough to diagnose the real cause of the change—have come to the conclusion that our competitors owe their success to those very fiscal and administrative fetters which we had discarded as obsolete, and that if we wish to save ourselves from ultimate defeat we must adopt their antiquated systems. Freedom, they say, means anarchy, and victory is only possible by discipline, organisation, centralisation. Individualism is hostile to efficiency. The democratic ideal is out of date. At the same time, the cult of humanitarianism has been driven out by the cult of nationalism.
As might have been foreseen by anyone who has watched the march of events with some comprehension of their meaning, the cry for protection was accompanied by the demand for the exclusion of alien immigrants. The sequence was logical and unavoidable. If it is to our profit to exclude the products of foreign labour by prohibitive duties, it is in the same way to our profit to exclude the foreign labourer. The two things, whether viewed from the economic point of view, the political, or the psychological, are indissolubly connected. They both are one expression of the twofold tendencies towards despotism and nationalism—control over the individual and hostility to the foreigner—reaction against free competition on the one hand and against internationalism on the other. Lukewarm or unintelligent pleaders for the one policy may oppose the other. But that the two demands are only two manifestations of one and the same principle is proved by the fact that, in their most uncompromising form, they are defended by the same advocates. At a meeting of the members of an East-end club which the late Home Secretary addressed on Dec. 7, 1903, a resolution, approving of the new trade policy was moved by Mr. D. J. Morgan, M.P., and was seconded by Major Evans Gordon, M.P., both prominent champions of the anti-alien cause. A protectionist writer on the subject of foreign immigration into England concludes his study of the problem with the following illuminating remarks: “Strong rivals, devoid of sentimentality and of the capacity for being fascinated by magic words—such as the word ‘free’—are striving to thrust us from our position. It is full time for us to abandon our long-played rôle of philanthropist among nations, and so to order our affairs, social and economic, that we reap as much advantage as possible and foreign nations as little. And one of these things to be altered is the free entry of foreigners into England.”[268]
As the numbers of foreign immigrants and the numbers of native unemployed went on steadily increasing, the outcry against the former went on steadily gaining in volume and vigour, and at last cohered into a definite campaign which, as might have been expected from the nature of the case, included in its ranks not only the friends of their own country, but the enemies of every other; not only aggressive Protectionists, but also philosophical Revisionists; not only the advocates of the British labourer, but also the adversaries of the Jew.
The first authoritative alarm of the Alien Peril was sounded in January, 1902, when Mr. Balfour, in the course of the debate on the Speech from the Throne, pointed out that, owing to America’s adoption of severer measures against alien immigration, England would be receiving even more immigrants than before. Not long afterwards a Royal Commission was appointed to inquire into the matter, and, after forty-nine public sittings, in which the evidence of one hundred and seventy-five witnesses was received, came to the conclusion that, although “it has not been proved that there is any serious direct displacement of skilled English labour,” “the continuous stream of fresh arrivals produces a glut in the unskilled labour market.”[269] Five out of the seven members recommended the exclusion of certain classes of immigrants, who were pronounced “undesirable” either on account of their character or owing to the economic position of the districts in which they settled in great numbers, and expressed the hope that the legislature would act on their recommendation.
Both objections—moral and economic—had been anticipated outside the Commission. On one occasion a London magistrate, in sentencing a foreign thief to six months’ hard labour, availed himself of the opportunity for stating that “the case fully illustrated how desirable and necessary it was to check the unwelcome invasion of alien criminals. At present,” he said, “the dregs of foreign countries flowed incessantly into hospitable England, and within a few days were engaged in committing all sorts of offences. The sooner Parliament framed laws to prohibit the landing of these undesirables the better.”[270] Such cases, and cases far less serious, accompanied by similar comments from the bench, became matters of daily occurrence. So unpopular did foreigners become that their exclusion would be urged because some of them at times obstructed thoroughfares with their wheel barrows, thus wasting the valuable time of the Police Courts and disturbing the equanimity of the Metropolitan constables. One day, for example, a Russian lad was brought up at the City Summons Court for causing obstruction with a barrow of fruit. Sir Henry Knight, the Magistrate, imposed on the offender a fine of two shillings, and, with admirable sense of proportion, improved the occasion as follows: “We must have these people stopped from being dumped down upon us. It is abominable!”[271]
On February 16, 1903, was formed an Immigration Reform Association, with the object of enlightening the public in general and legislators in particular on the alien question by means of pamphlets widely distributed among Members of Parliament and other speakers, as well as among working-class organisations. The information thus liberally supplied emphasised the connection of foreign immigrants with crime and vice, described the economic evils which result from the inflow of resourceless aliens and from their competition with the native labourers, and dwelt with especial minuteness on the overcrowding of certain districts of East London and the consequent dispossession of the native working population by the invaders. Towards the end of the same year (Dec. 7, 1903), Mr. Akers-Douglas, the Home Secretary, addressing the members of an East-end London Club, discoursed, amid great applause, on “the dumping of undesirable aliens,” quoting statistics to show how rapidly their numbers grew, and how the grievances of overcrowding, of crime and of competition grew with them, and concluding with the assurance that the Government was seriously contemplating stringent measures for checking the evil in time. A few months later (March 29, 1904) the Home Secretary redeemed his promise by bringing in a Bill “to make provision with respect to the Immigration of Aliens, and other matters incidental thereto.”[272]
In introducing this Bill Mr. Akers-Douglas took pains to persuade the House that the proposed measures were not directed against aliens as aliens, but against aliens as undesirables, and then proceeded to describe the evils, already mentioned, which the Bill was intended to remedy. Sir Charles Dilke protested against the measure on the ground that the majority of the aliens who came to this country, and who would be struck by the Bill, were the helpless victims of political and religious persecution. He affirmed that the native tradespeople had no grievance against foreign labourers, because they were able to absorb the comparatively small number of the latter by making them into good trade unionists. He disputed the figures quoted by the Home Secretary, asserting, on the strength of the Census and of the Royal Commission’s own Report, that the number of foreigners in this country all told was a mere drop in the ocean, and infinitely smaller than the number of foreigners resident in almost every other civilised country—in fact, that many more destitute Britons emigrated from the United Kingdom than destitute aliens came into it. The speaker next pointed out that the Bill would be used to exclude from England people whom afterwards we should be ashamed to have excluded. This measure, he said, had it been enforced at the time of the Paris Commune, would certainly have excluded many of the most distinguished exiles who arrived here in a state of starvation and whose return was afterwards welcomed by France with every expression of gratitude to this country for having maintained them—men like Dalou, one of the greatest sculptors of modern times, like the brothers Reclus, and many of the greatest scientists to whom we had been proud to give hospitality, or men like Prince Peter Kropotkin, who arrived in England stripped of every particle of his property by the Russian Government and was welcomed by the people of this country. The Russian Jews, against whom the heaviest allegations were made, inhabited Stepney and some portions of the East-end, and there were some in Manchester and Leeds. Of these some 20,000 were engaged in the tailoring industry, some 3500 in cabinet-making, and some 3000 in the boot and shoe trade. These were the whole of the people against whom this agitation was directed. The speaker had seen the broken-down prisoners from the “pale” sent for political reasons across Siberia. Those men were not the dangerous persons they were represented to be, miserable as might be their condition when they came here. They were not of a stock inferior to our own; and their stock, when it mixed with our own in the course of years, he believed, went rather to improve than to deteriorate the British race.
Leave was then given to bring in the Bill, which was read a first time. A month later (April 25, 1904) the Bill stood for second reading in the House of Commons and gave rise to a long and lively debate which lasted through the afternoon and evening sittings. In the course of the debate, the measure was discussed in all its aspects, was strenuously attacked by one party and defended as strenuously by the other. Sir Charles Dilke was again foremost in the fray. He moved an amendment “that this House, holding that the evils of low-priced alien labour can best be met by legislation to prevent sweating, desires to assure itself, before assenting to the Aliens Bill, that sufficient regard is had in the proposed measure to the retention of the principle of asylum for the victims of persecution.” This amendment the mover supported by an eloquent speech in which, having once more traversed the Home Secretary’s statistics, and once more reminded the House that these immigrants against whom the measure was directed were the victims of persecution for their religion—people whose friends had been burnt alive and hunted from their homes to death—finally expressed his conviction that behind this measure, not in the House, of course, but in the country, there was kindled an anti-Jewish feeling, warning those members of the Conservative party who participated in this agitation that they had raised a devil which they would find it very difficult to lay.
This statement, naturally enough, provoked many contradictions; but the speaker, in reply, justly asserted that the fact was patent to all readers of the newspapers which supported the Bill.