The Arena, Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891

by Various

In order to distinguish between these two classes of migration, I call this latter one "Inter-migration," and desire the term to stand for a change of habitation occurring within the boundaries of a land that is under the same government.

Inter-migration, although it has never before reached the development to which it has risen in the present, is not a new form of the migratory habit of peoples. Ancient records tell us that a forced inter-migration has frequently taken place. The conquerors of old, desirous of making one nation out of the many peoples they subdued by their valiant sword, would transplant large numbers of individuals from one province to another distant one, giving their land and their possessions in exchange to settlers, whom they drew from some other country. Their scheme, however, rarely succeeded, because the difficulties of a long journey made it impossible for them to transplant a sufficiently large number of people; the masses remained undisturbed, the few new-comers were soon absorbed by them, and the desired change of sentiment was not produced. The moment the government was attacked by a new conqueror, all provinces would at once rise in revolt, and thus hasten the downfall of empires, such as was, for instance, the Persian, before the onslaught of so small an army as that with which Alexander the Great crossed the Hellespont.

The golden era of the Roman Empire, and the prosperity and the culture which then prevailed, were made possible solely through the facilities which were given to inter-migration. Good roads connected the ends and dissected the width and breadth of the great Roman Empire. Travel was well protected. A well-drilled army suppressed highway robbery, and an excellent navy put down piracy. A resident of Gaul could with ease settle in Syria, while the Syrian, if he so desired, could find with ease a home in Gaul. The residents of Brittania and Greece could with comparative ease inter-migrate, and had not the floods of barbarians which deluged the Roman Empire put an end to civilization, and with it the possibilities of inter-migration, we might stand to-day on a much higher round of culture, and our knowledge might have been much greater than it is.

If the inventions of the nineteenth century have made possible emigration to such an extent to-day as never before existed, it has still more facilitated inter-migration. It has almost destroyed the equilibrium between the centripetal and centrifugal forces, giving the advantages to the latter. The facilities of locomotion have made people restless; the times have passed by when grandchildren would live in the same house in which their grandparents lived or when they consider it a hardship and misfortune to move out of such a habitation, or to see it change owners; time has been, when only the adventurer left his native place, and when it was considered dangerous to go into the world, which at that time could be circumscribed by a radius of a few miles; time has been, when people lived for generations in the same house, in the same street, in the same village or town, when even the household furniture became venerable on account of its antiquity and the remembrances connected with it. What boy or girl in our day plays around the chair which their great-grandfather used to occupy? To sell one house and move into another; to leave one city and seek settlement in another, is now the rule and not the exception; and it is mainly this inter-migration, stirring up the masses, to which is due our increased prosperity and our progress in all branches of knowledge. Inter-migration keeps us from stagnation; it removes shyness and fear at the sight of a stranger, accustoms us to an intercourse with different people, removes prejudices and superstitions, and facilitates the exchange of thoughts and ideas.

On the other hand, it cannot be denied that intermigration has also its drawbacks; that it will easily flood the labor market so as to screw down wages; it will foster the venturesome spirit, induce people to risk a certainty for an uncertainty, and especially has it tended to draw people from the rural districts to the large cities.

All the complaints heard against immigration, and all the pressure that is brought to bear upon the government to restrict it, do not come from the rural districts, but from the large cities; and it is generally overlooked that the competition, which presses down the compensation for labor to such a degree that the wages earned for hard work are sometimes not sufficient to support one person, and far less a family, is not brought about solely by the immigrant who comes from abroad, but is, to a very great extent, the consequence of inter-migration, of the influx of villagers into the cities. While in country places there is a scarcity of labor, thus in New England, for example, while many farms are vacant, there are people starving in the cities, unable to obtain work. The increase of large cities and of their population is beyond the proportion in which it formerly stood to that of the country. This has aroused the thoughts of many long-headed people, and investigations are being made on every hand, especially because some people are moved by fear that city life will corrupt morality. They take it for granted that country people are virtuous, and that vice finds its domicile only in the large centres of population, and having established these premises, they argue that the tendency of country people to move into cities shows a degeneracy on their part, or that the abnormal growth of cities is a sure token of the moral depravity which has taken hold of the people. This, however, is not true. There is as much iniquity in proportion in small communities as in large ones, and not unfrequently wickedness and viciousness are attributed to actions which, after all, are neither wicked nor vicious, but merely strange to one who is not accustomed to them. The tide of inter-migration, which swells the population of the cities, has its natural causes, of which moral corruption is the least.

The philosophers of the individualistic school will take exception, when I name as the first cause of the tendency to leave the village for the city, the fact that the more society becomes organized, the more each individual becomes a part of a system, the easier it is to obtain comfort, and that, having found the proper place, one can more easily excel in that sphere of life. True, a man living in a village may be able to secure for himself, without excessive labor, food that would keep him from starvation, and raiment and fuel to protect him against the inclemency of the weather; but man needs more than bread and meat, a coat and a pair of shoes. There are a thousand other things which bring cheer to him and make his life worth living, that he cannot obtain in rural solitude. He claims a right to these comforts, and tries to obtain them by seeking them where they are to be found. If simple support, which rustic life insures, was preferable to the insecurity of earning a livelihood in the city; if plenty of coarse food and the healthier habitation which the village offers, were sufficient to induce the over-worked, half-starved, and ill-tenanted city laborer to give up for them the other comforts which city life offers him, we should soon behold an exodus from the city to country places, instead of observing the growth of the centres of population. It is the tendency to work in a system and with a system which increases as the human being rises in culture and civilization. This is the magnet which draws people to large cities, and holds them there, despite the many drawbacks which naturally adhere to it.

The facility of locomotion and of transportation have made possible an interchange of commodities which has never been so before. The world has become one marketplace, upon which the commodities are thrown, and in which he who is able to sell an article of the same quality at the lowest rate will have most customers. When grain can be produced in large quantities in the West, so that it can be sold at a lower rate in the East than the cost of its production would be there, it is quite natural that the Eastern farmer must go to the wall, and it is no wonder he deserts his farm. The less the raw material can be used in its natural state, and the more our refinement demands a long process of converting it into a commodity, the more does it require systematic, organized, skilled labor to perform that conversion. With sufficient land a few people can raise such an abundance of raw material that the labor of thousands of people will be called for to change it into useful articles. It is the system, the developed social organization, which draws the villager to the city, and as an illustration I shall point to the sudden and unparelleled growth of the city of Berlin.

Twenty-five years ago Berlin was not quite as large in population as is Boston to-day, and its area was much smaller. Berlin is situated in a sandy, sterile country; so to say, in a desert. There is no navigable river to connect it with the ocean, nor are minerals or coal found in its immediate neighborhood. When Berlin was made the seat of the German government, the first result was that thousands of government officials were removed from other places to this city; then the garrison was enlarged. More commodious roads were built to connect the capital with the provinces. This attracted business men, as well as thousands whose services in all branches of life were required. The manufacturer soon followed, and Berlin became in a short time a commercial centre. Leipsic lost its prestige and Nuremberg its renown. The organized net-work of labor makes it possible now for a million and a half of people to live and prosper on that sterile ground. Let Berlin cease to be the capital of Germany, through any unforeseen event, and its population will melt away at once. Like iron filings hanging on a magnet, in which one particle attracts and holds the other, thus are people attracted to and held in places where society, and with it labor, is organized.

Another and weighty reason to account for inter-migration, and especially for the increase of population in cities, is that agriculture, too, has undergone a change. The inventive genius of our age, which keeps on creating labor-saving machinery, has not left this branch of occupation untouched. As the mechanic had to go in order to be replaced by the factory owner, thus the small farmer can no longer exist beside a syndicate which will systematically cultivate large tracts of land. The tendency of the time is to apply system also to agricultural pursuits, to take that art out of the sphere of instinct and to transplant it into the sphere of science.