With the establishment of these new lines of communication, it followed inevitably that the transportation companies should put forth every effort to attract as much business as possible to them. So we find the activities of transportation and emigration agents extending farther and farther into Europe, with the growth of lines that demanded their services. The importance of these agents in stimulating emigration will be discussed in another connection. Along with these changes, and incident to the beginnings of emigration from some of these new sources, there grew up in these countries a better knowledge of the United States, its attractions, and the means of getting there. This knowledge was very meager and faulty at first, and willfully distorted by the agents, but it served to awaken the people to the possibilities of emigration, and to stimulate them to take the step. This influence was abetted by a growing sense of independence and ambition on the part of the people of these regions, which made it more possible for them to act on their own initiative. They could never have emigrated under the conditions of difficulty, uncertainty, and hardship which marked the earlier movement, and which the more hardy, adventurous, and daring northern races faced without hesitation.
There are two further causes of this shifting of the sources of immigration from northern to southern Europe, which are even more significant than the foregoing. The first of these is that, with the filling up of the United States, and the industrial improvements of northern Europe, the economic situation in this country no longer presents the same marked advantages over the older nations that it did during most of the nineteenth century. The immigrant from England, Ireland, Germany, or Sweden no longer finds his lot so much easier here than at home. The United States has now its own problems of congestion, pauperism, and competition of labor. Consequently it is much less worth while for the northern immigrant to come. But as compared with the more backward countries of Europe, there is still a sufficient margin of advantage in the United States to make it well worth while for the peasant to make the change. The comparison of the conditions which exist, or which he believes to exist, in the United States, with those in his own land has still sufficient power to arouse those feelings of discontent which are necessary to migration.
The second of these causes is that when the representatives of more backward countries, representing a lower standard of living and of industrial demands, have once begun to come, the members of more advanced races cease coming. They are unwilling to take up residence in a country where they must enter into competition with their inferiors, and where all will be classed together by the natives. Our immigration started from the most advanced nations of Europe. Each inferior reservoir which we have successively tapped, and allowed to drain freely into our nation, has tended to check the flow from the earlier sources. This will continue to be true to the end. Canada recognizes this fact frankly, and while making every effort to attract immigrants from the United Kingdom and northwestern Europe places serious obstacles in the way of immigrants from the other half of the continent.[[112]]
In considering the specific causes of the rise of the new immigration we will confine our attention primarily to the countries of Austria-Hungary, Italy, and Russia, which send us the great bulk of the immigrants, and in which conditions are sufficiently representative to give a satisfactory idea of the nature of the new movement in general. Let us first consider Austria-Hungary.
The early immigration from Bohemia in the middle of the nineteenth century belongs in every way rather to the old than to the new immigration, and need not be considered here. As for the recent immigration from Austria-Hungary, it may be said that the underlying, fundamental factor is the racial diversity which characterizes that country. Austria-Hungary is not in any sense a nation, but a mixture of diverse and hostile races, held together primarily by the outside pressure of Russia, Germany, Italy, and Turkey. The attempt to get a clear and definite understanding of the racial composition of the empire is baffling to one who has not had the opportunity to make an exhaustive study of the situation at first hand, and even the authorities do not wholly agree as to the racial classification. The following sketch, taken from Professor Commons,[[113]] will give a sufficient idea of the complicated conditions which exist. In the territory of Austria-Hungary may be found considerable numbers of five important sections of the human family, as follows:
German.
Slav: Czechs or Bohemians, Moravians, Slovaks, Poles, and Ruthenians in the northern part; Croatians, Servians, Dalmatians, and Slovenians in the southern part.
Magyar.
Latin: Italians and Roumanians (Latinized Slavs).
Jewish.