rarily, using it as a stepping-stone to permanent farm work. With some of the South Italians, however, it is apparently a permanent status. The conditions

among seasonal laborers are more satisfactory than the surroundings of the same laborers in railroad work, but the limited duration of the season has prevented a great influx of foreigners into agricultural industries. There is no regular labor organization among seasonal laborers, but occasionally they strike for improvements and when there is a scarcity of laborers they generally win.

The Dearth of Farm Labor

The dearth of farmers and farm laborers has become a universally acknowledged and generally lamented fact. Mining, manufacturing and commercial centers within recent years have grown up like magic. By their glamor they have attracted large portions of the agricultural population. It has become more and more difficult and, had it not been for the invention of labor-saving machinery, it would be impossible to secure the necessary labor to prepare the soil and to harvest our large staple crops. In the South and West the absence of a proper labor supply has prevented the bringing of vast areas of vacant lands under cultivation.

Strange as it may seem, contemporaneously with the decline in numbers of our agricultural population, there has been an ever-growing alien influx to our industrial centers, consisting of farmers and farm laborers from the south and east of Europe. During the past decade seven out of every ten immigrants who landed at our ports were southern and eastern

Europeans. From one-third to three-fifths of these newcomers, the proportion varying according to race, had been engaged in agricultural pursuits before coming to the United States, but not one in ten have settled on farms in this country. They have found employment in the textile manufacturing localities of New England, the iron and steel, glass, clothing and coal producing cities and towns of the Middle and Western States. They have also penetrated to the West and Northwest and constitute in those sections the greater part of the operating forces of the mining and manufacturing establishments. There is scarcely an industrial community of any importance outside of the Southern States which has not its colony of Italians, Slavs, Hungarians and numbers of other races of recent immigration. In all sections the immigrant colonies are marked by a high degree of congestion and unsatisfactory and often unsanitary living conditions. The earnings of husbands are not sufficient to maintain an independent form of family life. Wives and children are at work in the mills and factories. Sleeping and living rooms of the households are crowded with boarders and lodgers who have been taken into the homes in order to supplement the family income. The significance of the entire industrial situation is that our manufacturing and mining localities are congested with an alien population of agricultural training and manner of life, while our farming communities are clamoring for more labor which they are unable to secure.

Why the Immigrant Does Not Go to the Land

When it is recalled that practically all of our immigrants of recent years are of non-English-speaking races, the principal reason for their failure to settle upon the land is apparent. They do not wish to become separated from members of their own race, upon whom they not only depend for an expression of their wants but to whom they also expect to turn in times of emergency or necessity. As a consequence, the alien of recent arrival seeks the colonies of his own people in our cities and towns. He becomes a miner, a steel or glass worker, or a textile operative, but does not enter farming.

There are also other reasons why the southern and eastern European does not go to the farm. Chief among these is the fact that the average immigrant of recent years, unlike his predecessor from Great Britain, Ireland and northern Europe, does not intend to remain permanently in the United States. After a few years of work and privation, he hopes to accumulate enough money to enable him to return to his native land and purchase a farm, remove a mortgage from property he already possesses, or to improve his economic status in some other way. He is not posses of the pioneering spirit which would lead him to create a home upon new or vacant lands in this country. He wishes to earn as much as he can within a limited time, and by living upon a basis of minimum cheapness to save the maximum amount possible. The inducement held forth by an industrial establishment offers the most available means for the gratification of this ambition. The invention of improved machinery renders it possible for the manufacturer or

mining operator to offer employment to the cheap and untrained alien. Furthermore, the necessitous condition of the present-day immigrant when he arrives in the United States makes it imeprative for him to seek work at once under any conditions which may be offered. He has no money with which to purchase land or to enter into any kind of farming which requires an outlay of capital. As a result of these conditions, the southern and eastern European farmer or farm laborer becomes transplanted to a new industrial environment in this country.

Getting the Immigrant on the Land

From the experience which has already been had with the recent immigrant, it is clearly apparent that if the dearth of farm labor and the congestion in the large industrial centers are to be relieved, the movement of the southern and eastern European to the land must be artificially stimulated. Under present conditions he has neither the means or the inclination to engage in agriculture. The barrier of language also prevents him from becoming a pioneer or independent farmer. It is this fact also that has rendered all past attempts toward inducing recent immigrants to become farmers, failures, unless they proceeded upon a colony or a community basis. Future activities in this direction must also be supported by large resources, for it will be necessary to maintain the foreign-born farmer while the land is being cleared and prepared for cultivation, and also to advance him the necessary stock and equipment with which to begin his labors. Undoubtedly the most successful policy in attracting recent immigration to the land would be

to select those who are now living in industrial cities and towns and who have become partly Americanized and have accumulated some savings. Representatives from all races among this class of industrial workers are almost without exception anxious to improve their economic condition by engaging in agriculture. They are usually good intensive farmers by training and heredity. The fact that they can speak English and are usually possest of a small amount of capital would also greatly simplify the problem of getting them successfully started on the land. The colonization agencies of the South and of other sections of the country, which are seeking to attract settlers to their vacant lands, will be permanently successful if they will give proper consideration to these teachings of experience and of existing industrial conditions.