the coal mines are operated without immigrant labor, and native white Americans are employed as unskilled laborers, their homes are primitive and insanitary.

It is evident that the cause of bad housing conditions is not racial, but economic. Congestion in great cities is produced by industrial factors over which the immigrants have no control. The fundamental cause of congestion with all its attendant evils is the necessity for the wageworker to live within an accessible distance from his place of work. In mining towns the mine company is usually the landlord, and the mine worker has no choice in the matter of housing accommodations. In so far, however, as housing conditions might affect the rates of wages of native and immigrant workmen, it is the amount of rent, not the equivalent in domestic comfort, that has to be considered. And here it is found that immigrants have to pay the same rent as, and often a higher rent than, native American wageearners. A certain proportion among the immigrants seek to reduce their rent by taking in boarders, but the practice is not universal, and the wages of the others must therefore provide for the payment of normal rent. Moreover, the recent immigrants are mostly concentrated in great cities, where rent is high, while the native American workmen live mostly in small towns with low rents.

Nor are the food standards of the recent immigrant inferior to those of native Americans with the same income. Meat, the most expensive article of food, is consumed by the Slav in larger quantities than by native Americans. Rent and food claim by far the greater part of a workman's wages. It is thus apparent that whatever may have been the immigrant's standard of living in his home country, his expenditure in the United States is determined by the prices ruling in the United States. Contrary to common assertion, the living expenses of the native American workman in small cities and rural districts are lower than those of the recent immigrants in the great industrial centers. It is therefore not the recent immigrant that is able to underbid

the native American workman, but it is, on the contrary, the latter that is in a position to accept a cheaper wage.

There is, of course, a difference between the expenses of a single and of a married workman. The necessary expenses of a single man are lower than those of one who has a family to support, and a large proportion of the recent immigrants are either single or have left their families abroad. But, while an unmarried American workman may either save or spend the difference, the recent immigrant is obliged to save a part of his earnings. He must repay the cost of his own passage; if he has left a family at home, he must save up money to pay for their passage, besides supporting them in the meantime. So when the recent immigrant is seen to deny himself every comfort in order to reduce his personal expenses to a minimum, it is a mistake to assume that he will accept a wage just sufficient to provide for his own subsistence. The Italian section hand who lives on vegetables does not save money for the railroad company. The economic interests of the American wage-earner are therefore not affected by the tendency of the recent immigrant to live as cheaply as possible and to save as much as possible. Whether he spends his wages for rent and dress, or saves his money to buy steamship tickets for his family; whether he invests his savings in a home in the United States or sends them to his parents for improving the home farm, his wants in one case are as urgent as in the other, and he must demand a wage which will enable him to satisfy them.

On the other hand, though the standard of living of the native or Americanized wage-earners be higher than that of the new immigrants, this difference is not necessarily indicative of a higher rate of wages: the higher standard is very often maintained with the earnings of the children, whereas the Southern and Eastern European immigrants are mostly young people whose children have not reached working age. The supposed difference in the standard of living can therefore have no effect upon the comparative rates of wages of English-speaking workmen and of recent immigrants.

But it is argued that the newly arrived immigrant must have work at once and is therefore glad to accept any terms. The Immigration Commission after a study of the earnings of more than half a million employees in mines and manufactures, has discovered no evidence that immigrants have been hired for less than the prevailing rates of wages.

The primary cause which has determined the movement of wages in the United States during the past thirty years has been the introduction of labor-saving machinery. The effect of the substitution of mechanical devices for human skill is the displacement of the skilled mechanic by the unskilled laborer. This tendency has been counteracted in the United States by the expansion of industry: while the ratio of skilled mechanics to the total operating force was decreasing, the increasing scale of operations prevented an actual reduction in numbers. Of course this adjustment did not proceed without friction. While, in the long run, there has been no displacement of skilled mechanics by unskilled laborers in the industrial field as a whole, yet at certain times and places individual skilled mechanics were doubtless dispensed with and had to seek new employment. The unskilled laborers who replaced them were naturally engaged at lower wages. The fact that most of these unskilled laborers were immigrants disguised the substance of the change the substitution of unskilled for skilled labor—and made it appear as the displacement of highlypaid native by cheap immigrant labor.

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To prove that immigration has virtually lowered the rates of wages, would require a comparative study of wages paid for the same class of labor in various occupations before and after the great influx of immigration. This, however, has never been attempted by the advocates of restriction. fact, the chaotic state of our wage statistics precludes any but a fragmentary comparison for different periods. In a general way, however, all available data for the period of "the old immigration" agree in that the wages of unskilled laborers, and even of some of the skilled mechanics, did not

fully provide for the support of the wage-earner and his family in accordance with their usual standards of living. The shortage had to be made up by the labor of the wife and children.

If the tendency of the new immigration were to lower the rate of wages or to retard the advance of wages, it should be expected that wages would be lower in great cities where the recent immigrants are concentrated, than in rural districts where the population is mostly of native birth. All wage statistics, concur, however, in the opposite conclusion. Since the United States has become a manufacturing country average earnings per worker have been higher in the cities than in the country. The same difference exists within the same trades between the large and the small cities. Country competition of native Americans often acts as a depressing factor upon the wages of recent immigrants. This fact has been demonstrated in the clothing industry, in the cotton mills, in the coal mines, etc.

Furthermore, if immigration tends to depress wages, this tendency must manifest itself in lower average earnings in States with a large immigrant population than in States with a predominant native population. No such tendency, however, is discernible from wage statistics. As a rule, annual earnings are higher in States with a higher percentage of foreign-born workers.

The conditions in some of the leading industries employing large numbers of recent immigrants point to the same conclusions. In the Pittsburgh steel mills the rates of wages of various grades of employees have varied directly with the proportion of recent immigrants. The wages of the aristocrats of labor, none of whom are Southern or Eastern Europeans, have been reduced in some cases as much as 40 per cent; the money wages of the skilled and semi-skilled workers, two thirds of whom are natives or old immigrants, have not advanced notwithstanding the increased cost of living, while the wages of the unskilled laborers, the bulk

of whom are immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, have been going up.

Another typical immigrant industry is the manufacture of clothing. The clothing industry has become associated in the public mind with the sweating system, and since the employees are, with few exceptions, immigrants from SouthJean Eastern Europe, the conclusion is readily reached that the root of the sweating system is in the character of the new immigration. Yet the origin of the sweating system preceded the Jewish clothing workers by more than half a century. Throughout the second quarter of the past century native American and Irish women worked in the sweat shops of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia for only board and lodging, or even for board alone, depending upon their families for other necessities, whereas the Jewish factory girls of the present day are at least self-supporting.

In the cotton mills of New England the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when the operatives were practically all of the English-speaking races, was a period of intermittent advances and reductions in wages; on the whole, wages remained stationary. The first years of the present century, up to the crisis of 1908, were marked by the advent of the Southern and Eastern Europeans into the cotton mills, and by an uninterrupted upward movement of wages. The competition of the cheap American labor of the Southern cotton mills, however, tends to keep down the wages of the Southern and Eastern European, Armenian, and Syrian immigrants employed in the New England mills.

As a general rule, the employment of large numbers of recent immigrants has gone together with substantial advances in wages. This correlation between the movements of wages and immigration is not the manifestation of some mysterious racial trait, but the plain working of the law of supply and demand. The employment of a high percentage of immigrants in any section, industry, or occupation, is an indication of an active demand for labor in excess