To take away the suffrage from many of those who enjoy it is peacefully impossible under our system. But voters who hold fast to the privilege for themselves may be induced to deny it to the next generation. It was in this way usually that the foregoing restrictions were introduced. Massachusetts set the example by retaining all who could vote when the test was adopted, and making the exclusion apply only to those who came after. The Southern states did the same by “grandfather” and “understanding” clauses. By either method, in course of time, the favored voters disappear by death or removal, and the restrictions apply in full to the succeeding generation.[118]
The effect of the educational test on the suffrage of the foreign-born is not as great as might be supposed. Naturalization itself is almost an educational test. Only 6.3 per cent of the naturalized foreigners are illiterate, but 28 per cent of those who remain aliens are unable to read. In Boston only 2 per cent are excluded from voting through inability to read English, although the corresponding aliens are 22 per cent. Probably the educational qualification in Massachusetts affects these proportions by lessening the inducement to naturalize, but in Chicago and New York, where that qualification is not required, scarcely more than 5 per cent of those who get naturalized would be unable to vote under such a law, compared with less than 1 per cent of the native voters.[119] In the country at large the disproportion is not so great. Five and eight-tenths per cent of the sons of native parents would be excluded by an educational test against 6.3 per cent of the naturalized foreigners, and only 2 per cent of the native sons of foreigners. In the several Southern states the test, if equally applied, will exclude 6 to 20 per cent of the white voters and 35 to 60 per cent of the colored voters.[120] In a Southern city like Memphis it would exclude 1 per cent of the white and 38 per cent of the colored.
Tested by the standards of democracy, the ability to read and write the English language is a proper qualification. It is perhaps the maximum that can be required, for to test the ability to understand what is read and written is to open the door to partisanship and race discrimination. Yet it is intelligence that makes the suffrage an instrument of protection, and it is not a denial of rights to refuse such an instrument to one who injures himself with it. The literacy qualification is one that can be acquired by effort. Other tests, especially the property qualification, are an assertion of inequality. Yet it is not strange that with the corrupt and inefficient governments that have accompanied universal suffrage there should have occurred a reaction. This has not always expressed itself in the policy of restricting the suffrage, for that can with difficulty be accomplished. It has shown itself rather in withdrawing government as far as possible from the control of the voters. The so-called “business theory” which has so generally been applied to the reform of city governments has converted the city as far as possible to the model of a private corporation, with its general manager, the mayor. The city has been denied its proper functions, and these have been turned over to private parties. But this reaction seems to have reached its limit. It is now understood to have been simply the legal recognition of an incipient plutocracy establishing itself under the forms of democracy. The return movement has begun, and the rescue of democracy is sought, as stated above, in forms and functions of government still more democratic.
The way plutocracy looks when it has passed the incipient stage may be seen in Hawaii.[121] It is as though we had annexed those islands in order to watch in our own back yard the fruit of excessive immigration. A population of 154,000 furnishes 65,000 Hawaiians, Portuguese, and other Caucasians. The Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans have 87,000 population and no votes. The American contingent is some 17,000 souls and 3000 votes. The latter represent four classes or interests: the capitalist planters owning two-thirds of the property; superintendents, engineers, and foremen managing the plantation labor; skilled mechanics; small employers, merchants, and farmers. In order to get plantation labor and to keep the supply too large and diversified for concerted wage demands the planters imported contract Chinese in place of Hawaiians, then Japanese, then Koreans. As each race rises in standards and independence it leaves the plantations to enter trades, manufactures, and merchandising. It drives out the wage-earners from the less skilled occupations, then from the more skilled, then the small manufacturers, contractors, and merchants. The American middle classes disappear, partly by emigration to California, partly by abandoning business and relying on the values of real estate which rise through the competition of low standards of wages and profits, and partly by attaching themselves to the best-paid positions offered by the planters. In proportion as they move up in the scale through the entrance of immigrants in the lower positions, they transfer their allegiance from democracy to plutocracy. The planters themselves are caught in a circle. The rising values of their land absorb the high tariff on sugar and prevent rising wages if the values are to be kept up. The Japanese, with contract labor abolished, have shown a disposition to strike for higher wages. This has led to advances at the expense of profits, and the resulting “scarcity of labor” compels the planters again to ask for contract Chinese coolies. Immigration is thus only a makeshift remedy for the exactions of unions and the undevelopment of resources. More immigration requires perpetually more and still more, till the resulting plutocracy seeks to save itself by servile labor. A moderate amount of immigrant labor, assimilated and absorbed into the body politic, stimulates industry and progress, but an excessive and indigestible amount leads to the search for coercive remedies and ends in the stagnation of industry. The protective tariff was supposed to build up free American labor, but in Hawaii, with unrestricted immigration, it has handed us American plutocracy.
CHAPTER IX
AMALGAMATION AND ASSIMILATION
A German statistician,[122] after studying population statistics of the United States and observing the “race suicide” of the native American stock, concludes: “The question of restriction on immigration is not a matter of higher or lower wages, nor a matter of more or less criminals and idiots, but the exclusion of a large part of the immigrants might cost the United States their place among the world powers.”
Exactly the opposite opinion was expressed in 1891 by Francis A. Walker,[123] the leading American statistician of his time, and superintendent of the censuses of 1870 and 1880. He said: “Foreign immigration into this country has, from the time it first assumed large proportions, amounted not to a reinforcement of our population, but a replacement of native by foreign stock.... The American shrank from the industrial competition thus thrust upon him. He was unwilling himself to engage in the lowest kind of day labor with these new elements of population; he was even more unwilling to bring sons and daughters into the world to enter into that competition.... The more rapidly foreigners came into the United States, the smaller was the rate of increase, not merely among the native population separately, but throughout the population of the country as a whole,” including the descendants of the earlier foreign immigrants.