To elucidate these propositions we cannot do better than here quote the carefully considered statements of the foremost of American publicists, Henry C. Carey, himself an American of Americans, and the great expounder of the protective system of political economy. As Chairman of the Committee on Industrial Interests and Labor, in its report to the Constitutional Convention of Pennsylvania in 1873, referring to the Immigration question, he writes as follows:
"Closing their eyes to the important facts which have been thus presented, very many of our working men look with jealous eyes at every measure tending toward bringing those of other countries to take a place side by side with them, believing, as they do, that the more the supply of labor the lower must certainly become the price. Nevertheless, could they but be persuaded to study carefully the facts of even the last twenty years they could not fail to become impressed with the fact, that growth of wages has always kept even pace with growth of immigration; the reward of labor on the contrary declining as immigration has been arrested or destroyed. At no previous period had the demand for labor, or its reward, grown so rapidly as in the early years of the great California one, say from 1850 to 1854, when immigration grew to 400,000. At none, has labor been more in excess of the demand than in the years that followed the great crisis of 1857, when immigration declined to figures scarcely greater than had been attained 20 years before; and when, as in 1860-61, not one out of five of the skilled workmen of the country was steadily employed. Here, in Philadelphia, when it was desired to build a street railroad they advertised for two hundred and fifty hands at but sixty cents a day, and had more than five thousand offered, a majority of whom were skilled artisans who were wholly out of work. In the neighborhood of one great establishment, a rolling mill, the number of unemployed men was so great that the county authorities, to save its skilled workmen from open pauperism, determined to build a turnpike, employing experienced hands at breaking stone, for fifty cents a day, rather than supporting them as paupers. At no period of our history has the reward of labor grown so rapidly as in the last ten years, when the exodus of European working men has so rapidly increased that the states of Central and Western Europe now find themselves forced to consideration of the measures required for retaining their countrymen at home; and when the highest German authorities admit that the pecuniary loss resulting from training and educating men for export to this country has now already more than counterbalanced the French indemnity of $1,200,000,000. To all appearance the immigration of the present year will closely approach to half a million; and yet it is at this moment, in face of so wonderful an addition to our stock of working men and women, that we have a determined agitation for bringing about a reduction of time and increase of wages. In the years prior to the rebellion, when immigration so largely declined, the agitation was for employment at almost any price. Why is this? Why is it that, contrary to the rule elsewhere observed, demand for labor goes ahead of supply when this latter is great, and falls behind it when the supply is small? To this the answer is, that the power to compel nature to labor in man's service increases almost geometrically as numbers increase arithmetically; as employment becomes diversified; and as men are more enabled to combine their efforts for attainment of that object."
"As a consequence of the great increase in the power of combination that has thus been brought about, we find the manufacturing product of the country to have grown in the period 1860 to 1872, from 1800 to 5000 millions, the mere increase having been almost twice the total amount to which the country had attained in the centuries that had preceded the war of the rebellion. Adding to the figures the foreign manufactures consumed, we obtain for the first—a period when immigration was rapidly declining—a total consumption of about $65 per head; whereas in the period which since has passed, and in which immigration has so greatly grown, it has risen to more than $130 per head. So far, therefore, is the working man from having occasion to dread the competition of the immigrant, that he needs, night and morning, to pray for maintenance of that policy which is now making demand on Europe for so much of its half fed and half clothed population, thereby compelling both landed and manufacturing capitalists to the adoption of measures tending so to improve the condition of them who are left behind as to induce them to forego the idea of abandoning their native land. Never in the world's history has there been furnished such conclusive evidence of the fact, that measures tending to benefit the working man anywhere tend toward raising his condition everywhere; and that, therefore, there is a perfect harmony in the real and permanent interests of mankind at large."
As still more directly bearing on this subject, I quote from the same report as follows:
"Less than a dozen years since, our working men looked jealously upon the negro, believing that any measure tending toward his emancipation would certainly be followed by such an influx of cheap labor as must seriously affect themselves. Directly the reverse, the negro migrates to Texas and there becomes a customer for manufactured products of a class greatly higher than that of those which his master had been accustomed to purchase for his slave."
Carey here reaches the very pith of the question. Every newcomer becomes a customer for those already on the ground, for all that he needs for his maintenance, just as the new born babe furnishes a new customer for the dry goods store, the milk man, not to mention the doctor and sometimes the lawyer. The baby, it is true, does not, as the phrase goes, "enter into competition" for a living, while the immigrant does, but in this respect the latter is the more valuable acquisition, for unless the immigrant is supported by charity, he has to produce at least as much as he consumes, and thus the community is an inevitable gainer by his presence. Inasmuch as a very large proportion of the immigrants produce more than they consume, in other words, save something of their earnings, it is manifest that the community gains doubly by their presence. It gains through the increase by the immigrant of the general social force, in his contribution to the total of the community's traffic and exchange, and also gains through the newcomer's addition to the general capital stock.
But, it is urged on the other hand, this may all be true of some kinds of immigrants, and not be true of others who are low in the scale of moral worth and of physical and intellectual capacity, and it is these whose coming should be restricted. Be it so; we may safely admit this proposition, and proceed thence to the sole remaining problem of drawing the line.
Where shall this line be drawn? The native American agitation proceeded on the very ground we have postulated, and grew to the proportions of carrying a majority in no less than nine states. It grew to these proportions as the result of an agitation that arose from the influx of impoverished Irishmen after the famine of 1847, and of their followers from Scotland and England in the succeeding decade. Has the agitation been justified by time? Have the prophecies of the Know Nothings that our people could not possibly assimilate the great mass of foreigners who were then thronging hither, whose proportion to the native population was even greater than it is now, who were alien to our institutions and our laws, in habits and in religion at variance with the great majority of the citizens, been fulfilled? Of course not; the facts have but developed what the common sense of the people soon perceived to be true. These immigrants have all been assimilated. Those of them that survive, and their children assuredly, have become thoroughly Americanized and effectually welded into the commonalty of our republic.