“Hundreds of thousands of penniless immigrants arriving in our ports every year! No wonder that in the American labor market competition grows fiercer and fiercer!”
Here we have two expressions of opinion that may be heard every day, and that give diametrically opposite views of one of the most familiar and important facts of the day. Which of the two is correct? Is the arrival of a foreigner, whose sole capital is his ability to labor, a benefit or an injury to the country? It is surely time that the question should be definitely decided in the popular mind. The annual influx of about half a million foreigners cannot but have a tremendous effect upon the industrial, social and political development of the country. If its effect is beneficial, then the influx should be encouraged and even stimulated; if injurious, it should be regulated and restricted.
The question is one for political economists and statesmen. Politicians of the ordinary sort will no doubt prefer to let it severely alone. It was indeed raised as a political issue by the defunct Knownothing party, but the shape in which it was presented, and the answer that it met, belong to a past generation. We have to deal with the subject anew, and at a more advanced point in our national history. Our condition, our needs, and our dangers are widely different from those of our predecessors, and changed circumstances may require altered policies.
Few will question the truth of the axiom that the great need of a new country is industrious immigrants. In the youth of the American commonwealth, its pioneers found themselves possessed of a vast continent of almost boundless natural resources, upon whose eastern edge a handful of scanty population was scattered. Had immigration ceased at the beginning of the present century, the development of those resources would have been incalculably retarded. This would be today a comparatively small, weak and indigent nation—more closely resembling, perhaps, the Canada of today than the United States of today.
So much for the past. Now for the future. Do not common sense and experience show that communities, like individuals, must have their birth, their adolescence, and their maturity? And must there not come a time in their development when accessions to their numbers are rather a burden than an aid? We have all heard of over populated countries, and it is not necessary to be a follower of Malthus to recognize that while population tends to multiply in an ever increasing ratio, there must always be a limit to the means of subsistence. That we are within measurable distance of such a limit we do not maintain; that we are advancing toward it cannot be denied.
Take England as an example of a country in the state of social and industrial development that we are approaching. She is old and crowded with population. Her resources have been exploited, her railroads have been built, her canals have been dug. Her industries are of course vast in extent, but their expansion becomes more and more difficult, and it grows harder and harder to find employment for the increasing hosts who demand work. If it were proposed to bring into England, from some other country, a hundred thousand, or even a thousand, penniless laborers, what a unanimous outcry would be raised against the inexpediency of such action! The vehemence with which the idea would be opposed may be judged from the uneasiness and even indignation already excited there by the gathering in London of a colony, comparatively insignificant in numbers, of immigrants from Eastern Europe.
The condition of the United States is still very different from that of England. She has over five hundred inhabitants to the square mile—we have but twenty. There are still fertile plains in the West that have not felt the plow, and lodes of ore in our mountains awaiting the miner’s pick. We have still great resources to develop. But there evidently is a point in a country’s history at which foreign immigration, once vitally beneficial, becomes injurious. The question that calls for earnest discussion and speedy settlement is whether we are now approaching that point—whether we have not already arrived there.
RULING OUT ART.
In their dealings with Art, Congress and the Treasury Department have not been fortunate. The legislative and executive authorities at Washington seem to think that the great and glorious principle of protection to American industries demands the exclusion or heavy taxation of every product of foreign art. The Treasury recently distinguished itself by issuing an order that all engravings, etchings, and photographs found in the mails from abroad should be confiscated. Under this ruling an American traveling or residing in Europe cannot mail a photograph to his relatives at home. An immigrant from Ireland or Germany cannot receive the likeness of his mother or sister in the “old country” unless it is sent him by an express company and through the custom house, whose expenses and delays are almost prohibitory.
It may be gathered from the preceding article that we believe in the exercise of the government’s powers for the encouragement of American industries and the protection of American labor. We are also patriotic enough to think that America is a civilized country, and that a policy of hostility to foreign art is unworthy of her. Art knows no international boundaries and is not a mere matter of dollars and cents. Even if it were, the prohibition or restriction of importations would make us poorer and not richer. Inspection of representative work from abroad is in a hundred ways beneficial to our own educational, artistic, and mechanical advancement. All this has been so fully and frequently pointed out, that we may hope some day to see it recognized in our fiscal system. The McKinley bill did indeed take a step in the right direction by reducing the duty on paintings and statuary from thirty to fifteen per cent ad valorem, leaving the tariff upon photographs, etchings, and all kinds of prints at twenty five per cent. It is difficult to see why the arguments that led Congress to cut off one half the tax upon paintings should not apply with equal force to the abolition of the other half. The Treasury order excluding photographs from the mails is surely oppressive enough to excite forcible protests. It is true that the ruling is in strict accordance with the letter of the law, which had previously been in abeyance. The annoyances—individually trifling, perhaps, but collectively serious—that its enforcement will cause, may result in strengthening the demand for the liberation of art from the customs officials.