LABOR
We have seen that the character of the immigrants for whom a place can
be found depends upon the character of the industry. It also depends
upon the laws governing property in labor. Here the industrial problem
widens out into the social problem.
There are four variations in the treatment of labor as property in the
United States, each of which has had its peculiar effect on the
character of immigration, or has grown out of the relations between
races. They are slavery, peonage, contract labor, and free labor. Under
slavery the laborer and his children are compelled by law throughout
their lifetime to work for an owner on terms dictated and enforced by
him. Under peonage the laborer is compelled by law to pay off a debt by
means of his labor, and under contract labor he is compelled by law to
carry out a contract to work. To enforce peonage and contract labor the
offence of "running away" is made punishable by imprisonment at forced
labor, or by extension of the period of service. Under freedom the law
refuses to enforce a contract to work, making this an exception to the
sacredness of contracts, and refuses to enforce the payment of a debt
by specific service. This leaves to the contractor or creditor the
usually empty relief of suing for damages. The significance of these
varying degrees of servile, semi-servile, and free labor will be seen in
the following discussion of the social relations of the superior and
inferior races.
In the entire circuit of the globe those races which have developed
under a tropical sun are found to be indolent and fickle. From the
standpoint of survival of the fittest, such vices are virtues, for
severe and continuous exertion under tropical conditions bring
prostration and predisposition to disease. Therefore, if such races are
to adopt that industrious life which is a second nature to races of the
temperate zones, it is only through some form of compulsion. The negro
could not possibly have found a place in American industry had he come
as a free man, and at the present time contract labor and peonage with
the crime of "running away" are recognized in varying degrees by the
laws of Southern states. These statutes have been held unconstitutional
by the Supreme Court,[79] under an act of Congress passed in 1867, but
the condition of peonage which they contemplate is considered by many
planters as essential to the continuance of the cotton industry. One of
them, in southwestern Georgia, a graduate of Columbia College, with five
years of business training in the Northern states, is quoted in an
interview as follows:[80]--
"We have two ways of handling our plantations. We rent small sections of
forty acres each, and with these go a plough and the mule. In addition,
I have about 450 hands who work on wages. These men are paid nine
dollars a month, in addition to a fixed rate of food, which amounts to
four pounds of meat a week, a certain percentage of vegetables, tobacco,
sugar, flour, and some other commodities.
"These negroes live on the plantation, are given a roof over their
heads, have garden patches, and several other more or less valuable
privileges. They invariably come to me for small advances of money.
"These advances of money and rations and clothing, although there is not
much of the latter, are frequently sufficient to put the negro in debt
to us. The minute he finds he is in debt he naturally conceives it to be
easier to go to work somewhere else and begin all over again, instead of
paying his debts.
"Now, when a negro runs away and violates his contract, leaving us in
the lurch, not only short of his labor, but short of the advances we
have made to him in money and goods, what would happen if we depended
simply and solely on our right to sue? In the first place, with 450
hands we would have 450 suits before the season is out, and if we won
them all we would not be able to collect forty-five cents.
"The result is, that in Georgia and Alabama, and I believe in other
states, the law recognizes the right of the planter to reclaim the
laborer who has left in violation of his contract, whether he be
actually in debt or not.
"Whether Judge Jones has declared this law constitutional or not, the
planters in the black belt will have to maintain their right to claim
their contract labor, or else they will have to go out of the business.
Under any other system you would find it impossible to get in your
cotton, because the negroes at the critical time would simply sit down
and refuse to work. When they are well, we compel laborers to go to the
field by force. This is the truth, and there is no use lying about it."
This reasoning is entirely logical from the business standpoint. If
production of wealth is the standard, contracts must be fulfilled and
debts must be paid. Otherwise capital will not embark in business. But
the reasoning does not stop with the negro. Once established, the
practice spreads to other races. Instances are cited of white men held
in peonage, negroes holding other negroes, and Italians forced to work
in a phosphate mine.[81] It is an easy matter to get working men in
debt. Many thousand rural justices keeping no records of convictions,
hundreds of constables with fees depending on convictions, scores of
petty crimes with penalties not usually enforced, contractors and
planters eager for labor at the convict's rating of 35 cents a
day--neither the negro nor the poor white is safe. Immigrants avoid a
country with such a record. Not only the dread of forced labor for
themselves but the dread of competition with the low wages that the
forced labor of others implies, keep the immigrants away from the South.
The fame of peonage is spread among them before they leave their native
land. The business that rests on coerced labor damages the whole
community for its own temporary gain. The right to quit work is as
sacred for the workman as the right to enforce contracts for the
capitalist. It is just as necessary to get energetic labor as it is to
get abundant capital to embark in business. By recognizing the right of
workmen to violate contracts, the employer learns to content himself
with contracts that will not hurt when violated. He learns to appeal to
the workman's motive to industry by methods that are not coercive.
Admitting that the bulk of what is said about the negro's fickleness is
true, he nevertheless is indiscriminately maligned. The thousands that
are unreliable furnish a cloak for suppressing the hundreds that are
industrious. I have made comparisons of the pay-rolls of two gas works
in Southern cities--the one employing negro stokers at 11 cents an hour,
the other whites at 22 cents an hour, and both working 12 hours a day
seven days a week. The negroes put in as many hours between pay-days as
did the whites, and if they "laid off" after pay-day it is no more than
any class of white workmen would do after two weeks of such exhausting
work. The negro in Southern cities can scarcely hope to rise above 12
cents an hour, and white mechanics have a way of working with negro
helpers at 10 cents an hour in order to lift their own wages to 20 cents
an hour. White wage-earners and white employers in the South speak of
the negroes' efforts to get higher wages in the same words and tones as
employers in the North speak of white wage-earners who have organized
unions and demanded more pay. A foreman condemned his "niggers" for
instability when they were leaving him at 10 cents an hour for a
railroad job at 12-1/2 cents an hour. Praising the Italians in
comparison with the negro, he could not think of paying 17-1/2 cents an
hour for pick-and-shovel work, which Italians were said to be getting in
another section of the state. The right to quit work is the right to get
higher wages. If the higher wages are paid and proper treatment
accorded, a process of natural selection ensues. The industrious and
steady workmen of all races retain the jobs. The gas company referred to
above, by a system of graded pay advancing with years of service, had
sorted out a more steady and reliable force of negroes than they could
have secured of whites at the rate of wages paid. The test is indeed a
severe one where a race has always been looked upon as servile. With
high wages regarded as "white man's wages," the process of individual
selection does not work out, and the dominant race excuses its resort
to whipping, beating, and peonage on the ground of the laziness which
its methods of remuneration have not learned to counterbalance. Even the
industrious Italians treated in this way would not be industrious--they
would leave for other states.
The Malay races, to which the Filipinos belong, are, like the negroes,
careless, thriftless, and disinclined to continuous exertion. In order
to induce the Javanese to work, the Dutch government of Java sets aside
a certain tract of government land for coffee planting, and compels each
head of a household to set out and keep in order a certain number of
coffee trees. On private estates in Java and in other Malay and Indian
colonies, such as Burma, Ceylon, British India, where the government
does not compel the native to take a contract to work, it nevertheless
enforces contracts voluntarily made. In certain provinces of the
Philippines "the tenants are usually in debt, and the old law which
permits the creditor to imprison the debtor for non-payment of debt is
still in force.... Landowners of a district frequently come together
shortly before the crops are sold and agree among themselves how much
interest to charge the tenants on their debts. This is for the purpose
of charging the highest possible rate and at the same time retain
tenants, who then could not leave, finding the same conditions
prevailing throughout the district."[82] In densely populated countries
like Java and Southern India, where the native cannot set up for
himself, he has no alternative except to work under these contracts, and
this is also true in the more thickly populated districts of the
Philippine Islands. But the case is different in sparsely settled
countries like Burma, East Sumatra, and the greater part of the
Philippines, where wages are so high that natives are not compelled by
necessity to work continuously. "Speaking generally," says Professor
Jenks, "the unskilled Filipino laborer, while intelligent enough, is
careless and thriftless. He in most cases wishes to take two or three
days a week, on the average, to celebrate as feast days. In individual
cases, where his wages have been increased, he has been known to lessen
correspondingly the number of days per month which he would work. His
income being sufficient to satisfy his modest needs, he could see no
reason why he should toil longer than was necessary to earn his
income."[83]
Hence in these sparsely settled countries the Dutch and English
governments have adopted, and Professor Jenks, in his report to the War
Department, has recommended a limited use of the system of contract
labor, not, however, for the native, but for imported Chinese. This
system has existed in another of our newly acquired possessions, Hawaii,
since 1852, where it applied to Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, and
German immigrants, and whence it was abolished by the act of
annexation in 1898.[84]
[Illustration: FILIPINO GOVERNORS (From Census of the Philippine Islands)]
Contract labor of this kind is quite different from the peonage and
contract labor of the non-industrial races. It is similar to the
indentured service of colonial times, in that the term of each contract
is limited to a few years, and the contract is made by way of
compensation for advanced expenses of immigration. The object is not, as
in the case of slavery and peonage, to compel a shiftless race to work,
but it is to develop the country by the introduction of an industrious
race. The Chinese, after the expiration of their contracts, often become
skilled laborers and merchants, and in the latter position their
frugality and wiliness make them dangerous neighbors for the native
Malay and Filipino races.[85] For this reason Professor Jenks recommends
that employers be placed under bonds to return each contract Chinese
coolie to China at the expiration of the period of contract, not to
exceed three years, unless the government gives special permission for
renewal of the contract. Governor Taft, in his report for the year 1902,
while advocating a limited employment of Chinese contract coolies, said,
"the truth is that, from a political standpoint, the unlimited
introduction of the Chinese into these islands would be a great mistake.
I believe the objection on the part of the Filipinos to such a course to
be entirely logical and justified. The development of the islands by
Chinamen would be at the expense of the Filipino people, and they may
very well resent such a suggestion."[86]
Governor Taft's opinion is strongly supported by the special
commissioner of the American Federation of Labor, who, after inquiries
in the district surrounding Manila, reports as follows:--
"Their reluctance to work, continually harped upon by many employers, is
simply the natural reluctance of a progressive people to work for low
wages under bad treatment. When wages rise above the level of the barest
and poorest necessaries of life, and where treatment is fair, there
Filipinos are at work in any numbers required."[87]
The situation here is similar to that of the negroes. In order to get
two hundred steady workers at high wages it is necessary to try out a
thousand or more. But the reports of the Philippine Commission show that
with the process of selection which their engineers can pursue by means
of the high wages on government work the results are satisfactory.[88]
"Of course," continues Mr. Rosenberg in his report, "the Filipino worker
cannot successfully compete--cheap as he can live--with the Chinese
standard of living, hence the unceasing vilification of the Filipino
workers by those employers and their following, who, seeing near by the
unlimited supply of cheap Chinese labor, wish these islands to be
thrown open to such labor, not only for the purpose of reducing the
small wages of the Filipinos, but also to reduce that of the Chinese
laborers now here. As one employer stated to me, 'We want more Chinese,
to keep them here for one or two years, then ship them back and get
another lot, for the Chinese I have here now are becoming too
independent and want more pay.'"
=Free Labor.=--The free laborer is not compelled by law to work. Then why
should he work? Why does he work? The answer is found within himself. He
wants something that he cannot get without working. Though this may seem
a trifling question and a self-evident answer, the question and answer
are the foundation of all questions of free institutions. For the
non-working races and classes or the spasmodic and unreliable workers
are the savages, paupers, criminals, idiots, lunatics, drunkards, and
the great tribe of exploiters, "grafters," despots, and "leisure
classes," who live on the work of others. Nearly every question of
social pathology may be resolved to this, Why does he not work? And
nearly every social ill would be cured if the non-workers could be
brought voluntarily to work.
There are just two grand motives which induce the freeman to
work--necessity and ambition. Necessity is the desire for quantity,
quality, and variety of things to be used. The term is elastic. It is
psychological, not material. It includes, of course, the wants of mere
animal existence--food, clothing, shelter. But this is a small part. The
cost of the mere quantity needed to support life is less than the added
cost needed to secure the quality and variety that satisfy the taste and
habits. A pig enjoys raw corn, but a man requires corn cake at five
times the cost. Tastes and habits depend on one's childhood, one's
training, one's associations, and kind of work. The necessities of a
Chinese coolie, Italian immigrant, or negro plantation hand are less,
and cost less, than those of a skilled mechanic or a college graduate,
because his associations have been different, and his present work is
different. But necessity goes farther. It includes the wants of the
family considered as a unit, and not merely the wants of the single man
or woman, else the race would not continue to increase. Furthermore,
social obligations impose added necessity. Compulsory education of
children compels parents to support their children instead of living on
their wages. Laws regulating sanitation and tenements compel the tenant
to pay more rent. The necessities of a farm-hand on the estates of Italy
are less than those of the same hand in the cities of America.
Ambition is the desire for an improved position for one's self and
family--for better quality and greater variety of material things. It
demands a style of clothing and living suitable to the improved position
aspired to. It demands an education for one's children superior to the
minimum set by compulsory schooling. It demands thrift and economy for
the sake of independence or the ability to hold on until one's demands
are conceded. Ambition looks to the future--necessity is based on the
past. The negro or the Malay works three days and loafs three because
three days' wages procure his necessities. The Chinaman, or Italian, or
Jewish immigrant works six days and saves the wages of three because the
future is vivid to his imagination. With similar necessities one is
ambitious, the other is content.
The scope and possibility of evoking ambition depend upon the
institution of private property. Property in human beings suppresses it,
unless occasionally a slave is permitted to purchase his freedom. The
wage system evokes ambition if the way is open for promotion or for
escape by becoming an owner. Tenancy is on a still higher level, but
most of all, for the masses of men, the ownership of his own small
property is the keenest spur to ambition, for it rewards the worker with
all of his product. This motive is the surest test of an individual's or
a race's future. Compare the negro and the Italian cotton grower as
tenants in the new vocation opening up to the latter. "It is always
difficult," says the observant planter, Mr. Stone,[89] "to get a negro
to plant and properly cultivate the outer edges of his field--the
extreme ends of his rows, his ditch banks, etc. The Italian is so
jealous of the use of every foot for which he pays rent that he will
cultivate with a hoe places too small to be worked with a plough, and
derive a revenue from spots to which a negro would not give a moment's
thought. I have seen them cultivate right down to the water's edge the
banks of bayous that had never been touched by the plough. I have seen
them walk through their fields and search out every skipped place in
every row and carefully put in seed to secure a perfect stand. I have
seen them make more cotton per acre than the negro on the adjoining cut,
gather it from two to four weeks earlier, and then put in the extra time
earning money by picking in the negro's field."
But ambition has its penalty. It is equivalent to an increase in the
supply of labor. As an ambitious proprietor the increase goes into his
permanent property, but the ambitious wage-earner accepts a lower rate
of pay. His fellows see the reduction and go still lower. The see-saw
continues until wages reach the level of necessities, and there is
nothing left for ambition. The Jewish sweat-shop is the tragic penalty
paid by that ambitious race. In the Illinois coal mines the wages were
reduced one-third during twelve years of Italian and Slav immigration.
The ambitious races are the industrial races. But their ambition and
their industry bring the momentous problem of destructive competition.
It might seem that this evil would correct itself--that an increase in
the products of one industry would be offset by an increase in other
industries; that therefore the increased supply in one would not be
forced upon the market at lower prices, but would be exchanged on the
same terms as before for the increased supply in others. This is indeed
the case in prosperous times. All industries advance together, and the
increasing supply of one is merely an increasing demand for others. But
for some reason, industries do not always harmoniously advance together.
And when the disproportion appears, the workers who are blindly but
ambitiously pushing ahead endeavor to overcome, by increasing the
quantity of output, what they lose by reducing the price. There is but
one immediate and practical remedy--the organization of labor to
regulate competition. The method of organization is to do in concert
through self-sacrifice what the non-industrial races do individually for
self-indulgence; namely, refuse to work. Where the one loafs the other
strikes. While the necessities of the workers set the minimum below
which wages cannot fall, and their physical endurance sets the maximum
hours beyond which they cannot work, the labor-union, by means of the
strike or the threat to strike, sets a higher minimum of wages and a
lower maximum of hours, which leaves room for ambition. Eventually the
higher wage and the shorter hours become habitual and become a higher
level of necessities. Gifted individuals may, indeed, rise above the
wage-earning class by their own efforts, but labor organization alone
can raise the class as a whole.
The organization of workmen in labor unions has been more difficult in
this than in other free countries, owing to the competition of races.
Heretofore it has been the easiest possible matter for a manager,
apprehensive of agitators in forming a union, to introduce a new race
and a new language into his works. Indeed, almost the only device and
symptom of originality displayed by American employers in disciplining
their labor force has been that of playing one race against another.
They have, as a rule, been weak in methods of conciliation and feelings
of consideration for their employees, as well as in the means of
safeguarding life and health, but they have been strong with the weapon
"divide and conquer." The number of races they have drawn upon is often
amazing. The anthracite mine workers comprise nineteen languages and
dialects. The employees of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company belong to
thirty-two nationalities and speak twenty-seven languages. Such a medley
of races offers indeed a disheartening prospect to the union organizer.
And therefore when these races finally organize, the change in their
moral character must be looked upon as the most significant of the
social and industrial revolutions of our time. The United Mine Workers
of America, with 300,000 members, is very largely composed of recent
immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. So with the Longshoremen,
the United Garment Workers, and the Butcher Workmen. These are or have
been among the strongest and best disciplined of American labor-unions.
The newest races of the past twenty years have been coming long enough
to have members who speak the English language and act as interpreters
and leaders, and this is essential where the speeches at a union meeting
must be translated often into four or five languages before the subject
can be voted upon. Furthermore, the recruiting area for new races has
been nearly exhausted, and the races now coming find their
fellow-countrymen already in the unions. In the anthracite coal field I
saw a dozen Slovaks just arrived from Hungary, but persuaded by their
unionized precursors not to take the places of strikers. In New York a
shipload of Italians in time of strike has been taken directly into the
union. Such a sight would have been unlikely a dozen years ago.
The competition of races is the competition of standards of living. The
reason the Chinaman or the Italian can save three days' wages is because
wages have been previously fixed by the greater necessities of more
advanced races. But competition has no respect for superior races. The
race with lowest necessities displaces others. The cotton textile
industry of New England was originally operated by the educated sons and
daughters of American stock. The Irish displaced many of them, then the
French Canadians completed the displacement; then, when the children of
the French had begun to acquire a higher standard, contingents of
Portuguese, Greeks, Syrians, Poles, and Italians entered to prevent a
rise, and latterly the Scotch-Irish from the Appalachian Mountains came
down to the valleys of the South, and with their low wages, long hours,
and child labor, set another brake on the standard of living. Lastly,
Italians are beginning to be imported to supplement the "poor whites."
Branches of the clothing industry in New York began with English and
Scotch tailors, were then captured by Irish and Germans, then by Russian
Jews, and lastly by Italians, while in Boston the Portuguese took a
share, and in Chicago the Poles, Bohemians, and Scandinavians. Almost
every great manufacturing and mining industry has experienced a similar
substitution of races. As rapidly as a race rises in the scale of
living, and through organization begins to demand higher wages and
resist the pressure of long hours and overexertion, the employers
substitute another race and the process is repeated. Each race comes
from a country lower in the scale than that of the preceding, until
finally the ends of the earth have been ransacked in the search for low
standards of living combined with patient industriousness. Europe has
been exhausted, Asia has been drawn upon, and there remain but three
regions of the temperate zones from which a still lower standard can be
expected. These are China, Japan, and India. The Chinese have been
excluded by law, the Japanese and Koreans are coming in increasing
numbers, and the Indian coolies remain to be experimented upon. That
employers will make strenuous efforts to bring in these last remaining
races in the progressive decline of standards, to repeal the Chinese
prohibitive laws and to prevent additions to these laws, naturally
follows from the progress toward higher standards and labor
organization already made by the Italian and the Slav.
The trade-union is often represented as an imported and un-American
institution. It is true that in some unions the main strength is in the
English workmen. But the majority of unionists are immigrants and
children of immigrants from countries that know little of unionism.
Ireland and Italy have nothing to compare with the trade-union movement
of England, but the Irish are the most effective organizers of the
American unions, and the Italians are becoming the most ardent
unionists. Most remarkable of all, the individualistic Jew from Russia,
contrary to his race instinct, is joining the unions. The American
unions, in fact, grow out of American conditions, and are an American
product. Although wages are two or three times as high as in his
European home, the immigrant is driven by competition and the pressure
of employers into a physical exertion which compels him to raise his
standard of living in order to have strength to keep at work. He finds
also that the law forbids his children to work, and compels him to send
them to school to maintain a higher standard and to support his children
he must earn more wages. This he can do in no other way than by
organizing a union. The movement is of course aided by English-speaking
outsiders or "agitators," especially by the Irish, but it finds a prompt
response in the necessities of the recruits. Labor organization is
essentially the outcome of American freedom, both as a corrective to the
evils of free competition and as an exercise of the privilege of free
association.
When once moved by the spirit of unionism, the immigrants from
low-standard countries are the most dangerous and determined of
unionists. They have no obligations, little property, and but meagre
necessities that compel them to yield. The bituminous coal miners were
on strike four months in 1897 and the anthracite mine workers five
months in 1902. Unionism comes to them as a discovery and a revelation.
Suddenly to find that men of other races whom they have hated are really
brothers, and that their enmity has been encouraged for the profit of a
common oppressor, is the most profound awakening of which they are
capable. Their resentment toward employers who have kept them apart,
their devotion to their new-found brothers, are terrible and pathetic.
With their emotional temperament, unionism becomes not merely a fight
for wages but a religious crusade. It is in the nature of retribution
that, after bringing to this country all the industrial races of Europe
and Asia in the effort to break down labor organizations, these races
should so soon have wiped out race antagonism and, joining together in
the most powerful of labor-unions, have wrenched from their employers
the greatest advances in wages.
There is but one thing that stands in the way of complete unionization
in many of the industries; namely, a flood of immigration too great
for assimilation. With nearly a million immigrants a year the pressure
upon unions seems almost resistless. A few of the unions which control
the trade, like the mine workers and longshoremen, with high initiation
fees and severe terms of admission, are able to protect themselves by
virtue of strength already gained. But in the coast states and on
miscellaneous labor this strategic advantage does not exist, and the
standards are set by the newest immigrants.
[Illustration: GOVERNOR JOHNSON OF MINNESOTA.--SWEDE (From _The World
To-Day_)]
=Profits and Wages.=--We have now stated at some length in this and the
preceding chapter the two standpoints from which the immigration of
industrial races is viewed. One standpoint is that of the production of
wealth, the other the distribution of wealth. One is the development of
our natural resources, the other is the elevation of our working
population. If we inquire somewhat more critically and take into account
all of the circumstances, we shall find that the motives animating this
difference of policy are not really the above distinction between
production and distribution, but the distinction between two opposing
interests in distribution; namely, profits and wages. Unfortunately it
is too readily assumed that whatever increases profits does so by
increasing production. As a matter of fact it is only secondarily the
production of wealth and development of resources that is sought by one
of the interests concerned--it is primarily increase of profits at the
expense of wages. Cheap labor, it is asserted, is needed to develop the
less productive resources of the country--what the economists call the
margin of production. It is needed to develop the less productive
industries, like sugar beet, and the less productive branches of other
industries, like the construction of railways in undeveloped regions or
the reconstruction of railways in older regions, or the extension of a
coal mine into the narrow veins, and so on. Without cheap labor these
marginal resources, it is asserted, could not profitably be exploited,
and would therefore not be developed.
This argument, within limits, is undoubtedly true, but it overlooks the
part played by machinery and inventions where wages are high. The
cigar-making machine cannot extensively be introduced on the Pacific
coast because Chinese cheap labor makes the same cigars at less cost
than the machines. High wages stimulate the invention and use of
machinery and scientific processes, and it is machinery and science,
more than mere hand labor, on which reliance must be placed to develop
the natural resources of a country.
But machinery and science cannot be as quickly introduced as cheap
immigrant labor. Machinery requires accumulation of capital in advance
of production, but labor requires only the payment of daily wages in the
course of production. Consequently in the haste to get profits the
immigrant is more desired than machinery. But excessive profits secured
in this way bring reaction and a period of business depression which
check the production of wealth even more than the period of prosperity
has stimulated production. Consider the extreme vacillations of
prosperity and depression which characterize American industry. In a
period of prosperity the prices of commodities rise rapidly, but the
wages of labor, especially unorganized labor, follow slowly, and do not
rise proportionately as high as prices. This means an enormous increase
in profits and production of commodities. But commodities are produced
to be sold, and if the market falls off, then production comes to a
standstill with what is known as "overproduction." Now, wage-earners are
the mass of consumers. If their wages do not rise in proportion to
prices and profits, they cannot purchase as large a proportion of the
country's products as they did before the period of prosperity began.
"Overproduction" is mainly the "underconsumption" of wage-earners.
Immigration intensifies this fatal cycle of "booms" and "depressions." A
natural increase in population by excess of births over deaths,
continues at practically the same rate year after year, in good times
and bad times, but an artificial increase through immigration falls off
in hard times and becomes excessive in good times. Thus, in 1879, at the
lowest point of depression, the number of immigrants was 177,826, but
three years later, in the "boom" culminating in 1882, it rose to
788,992. In nine years following the depression of 1897 the number
increased from 230,000 to 1,100,000.
Even this does not tell the story complete, for the effects of free
immigration are intensified by the opposite policy of a protective
tariff on imports. While labor is admitted practically free, the
products of labor are taxed to prevent free ingress. The following table
shows the extreme points in the rise and fall of immigration and
imports:--
CULMINATING POINTS OF IMMIGRATION AND IMPORTS OF MERCHANDISE
=================+=========================+=======================
| IMMIGRATION | IMPORTS
YEAR ENDING +----------+----------+--------------+------------
JUNE 30 |Prosperity|Depression| Prosperity | Depression
-----------------+----------+----------+--------------+------------
1873 | 459,803 | | $642,000,000|
1879 and 1878[90]| | 177,826 | |$437,000,000
1882 | 788,992 | | 725,000,000|
1886 and 1885[90]| | 334,203 | | 578,000,000
1893 | 439,307 | | 866,000,000|
1897 and 1898[90]| | 230,832 | | 616,000,000
1906 |1,100,735 | | 1,226,000,000|
-----------------+----------+----------+--------------+------------
By comparing the two sets of columns it will be seen that, owing to the
protective tariff, the imports of merchandise vary but slightly in
periods of prosperity and depression compared with the variation in
number of immigrants. Thus in the recent period of prosperity, the
imports increased twofold above the lowest point of the preceding
depression, while the number of immigrants increased nearly fivefold.
The swell of immigration in the above-mentioned periods of prosperity
increases the supply of labor, but the protective tariff prevents a
similar increase in the supply of products. Thus immigration and the
tariff together prevent wages from rising with the rise in prices of
commodities and cost of living. This permits profits to increase more
than wages, to be followed by overproduction and stoppage of business.
Furthermore, when once the flow of immigrants is stimulated it continues
for some time after the pinnacle of prosperity has been reached. In 1903
the boom met a check at the beginning of the year, but the number of
immigrants continued to increase during the summer and fall at the rate
of 20,000 per month in excess of the number during the high period of
prosperity in 1902. This makes it possible for great corporations to
continue their investments by means of cheap labor beyond the probable
demands of the country, with the result of overproduction, loss of
profits, inability to pay fixed charges, and consequent panics. Thus it
is that immigration, instead of increasing the production of wealth by a
steady, healthful growth, joins with other causes to stimulate the
feverish overproduction, with its inevitable collapse, that has
characterized the industry of America more than that of any other
country. It helps to create fortunes during a period of speculation, and
intensifies the reaction during a period of stagnation.