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with European labor to assist in the development of American industry.

The Immigration Commission contended that there was, nevertheless, an oversupply of unskilled labor due to immigration. The guiding idea of its report is the belief that native Americans and older immigrant workers had been displaced by recent immigrants. In support of this theory the Commission quoted census statistics for the decade 18901900. On closer examination, however, the figures of the censuses of 1890 and 1900 proved quite the opposite of what the Commission intended to prove. Yet Prof. Fairchild would not give up a hypothesis merely for want of facts to support it. The decade 1890-1900, he objects, is inconclusive, because it was a period of light immigration, but if the author had consulted the figures of the XIII. Census, which followed a decade of heavy immigration, they would tell another story. Regardless of the general rule that the burden of proof is not on the negative, but on the affirmative —in the present case, upon that side which affirms the theory of "racial displacement"—it is characteristic of Prof. Fairchild's easy methods of reasoning that at the time he made this guess the occupation statistics of the XIII. Census had not yet been published, so he manifestly did not know what they would show.

The present writer was not satisfied, however, to rest his conclusions on the period relied upon by the Immigration Commission, but, anticipating such hypothetical objections as those of Prof. Fairchild, he perused the report of the Massachusetts state census of 1905, which showed "no material change in the make-up of the industrial forces during the first five years of the present century" (see p. 176). The years 1900-1905 were marked by heavy immigration; the total for the five-year period, 3,841,646, exceeded the total for the previous decade;1 the net immigration for the five calendar years 1900-1904, preceding the Massachusetts state census, was nearly equal to the net immigration for the 1 Reports of the Immigration Commission, vol. i, pp. 56, 57.

next five years, 1905-1909, preceding the XIII. Census of the United States (see Table 8, on p. 90); Massachusetts is one of the states with a large immigrant population. In the absence of any data to the contrary, the results of the Massachusetts census could properly be accepted as an indication that the data for 1890-1900 still held good in 1910.

The XIII. Census report on occupations was subsequently published in an uncompleted form, with a new classification which rendered its figures non-comparable with those of the preceding censuses.

Another of the popular myths related to the subject of labor supply is the alleged "stimulation" of immigration. The author has quoted the statement of the Immigration Commission that "owing to the rigidity of the law and the fact that special provision is made for its enforcement, there are probably at the present time relatively few actual contract laborers admitted." This does not satisfy Prof. Fairchild. He insinuates that the author has deliberately omitted other qualifying statements of the Commission. He quotes a sentence to the effect that "a very large number . . . come in response to indirect assurance that employment awaits them" (which, as a matter of fact, he could have found on p. 94 of this book, reproduced in almost identical language from another page of the same volume). He further quotes the opinion of the Commission that "it is certain that European immigrants, and particularly those from southern and eastern Europe, are, under a literal construction of the law, for the most part contract laborers" (p. 761). He is not disturbed by the glaring contradiction between this conclusion and the other that "owing to the rigidity of the law" and its effective enforcement there are "few actual contract laborers admitted." He fails to perceive the distinction between a statement of facts and a conclusion, and is apparently unfamiliar with the time-honored rule of evidence that one may accept the testimony of witnesses concerning facts, without accepting their conclusions from those facts.

Closely connected with the subject of unemployment is

the effect of machinery upon the demand for labor. Here again deductive reasoning has failed our learned economists. Prof. Fairchild denies "the assumption (sic!) that laborsaving machinery supplants skilled labor to a much greater extent than unskilled labor" (p. 763). He is seconded by Dr. Foerster, who has picked out a number of exceptions, of which only one need be mentioned here: "The old cobbler was not superior to the worker in the modern shoe industry" (p. 665). He should brush up on his Taussig, where he will find the following:

The cobbler of former days put together a shoe by himself; in a modern factory the shoe goes through some eighty different processes. . . . The machines now used . . . have extended the principle of the automatic repetition of identical movements to tasks long thought too intricate to be amenable to such methods. . . . The skillful workman and the adaptable tool retain a large place in industry; but the range of their work tends to become more and more restricted.1

This proposition has become a truism. The author has quoted a statement of Professors Jenks and Lauck which incidentally refers to the fact that "the invention of mechanical methods and processes" has resulted in the employment of "unskilled industrial workers as a substitute for the

1 Principles of Economics, by F. W. Taussig, vol. i, pp. 35-36.—That the theory originated by Prof. Fairchild and Dr. Foerster had been unknown to their predecessors in the field of economics, appears from the following references: "The effect of improvements in machinery," according to an early writer, consists “in substituting one description of human labor for another-the less skilled for the more skilled." -Andrew Ure: The Philosophy of Manufactures, p. 321 (Third edition, London, 1861). “A factor that has had a real tendency to lower the actual average earnings of the wage-earner in many of the industries is the displacement of the skilled operative by machinery, which permits the substitution of a comparatively unskilled machine hand. This tendency is noticeable in many lines of industry."-Twelfth Census, Manufactures, vol. i, p. 123. President McKinley's Industrial Commission, discussing the effects of immigration upon wages, remarked that "machinery... by displacing the skilled mechanic, makes room for the unskilled immigrant."-Report of the Industrial Commission, vol. xv, P. xxiii.

skilled operatives formerly required" (see p. 290). That in some cases the machine has substituted a new kind of skill for the old one, may be conceded. But the error is in the deductive reasoning from insufficient facts, which are generalized out of all proportion to their real place in modern industry. If Dr. Foerster had taken note of the statistics compiled by Mr. Fitch in his study of the steel workers (reproduced in Table 121 of this book) he would realize that the skilled workers constitute only about one-sixth of the force of a modern steel plant, whereas more than three-fifths are unskilled laborers. Owing to his misconception of the effects of machinery he fails to see that the introduction of new labor-saving machinery as a substitute for immigration would displace the skilled labor of the native American workers and reduce them to the condition of unskilled laborers (see Chapter XXIII).

The contempt of both reviewers for facts is reflected in their judgments on every economic and social problem. Discrimination between recent immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and older immigrants from northern and western Europe, runs through the whole report of the Immigration Commission, yet Dr. Foerster wonders, are there really "persons who ask for restriction on the ground that former immigrants were 'more desirable' than the present ones"? (p. 658). He ridicules the idea that "a reduction in the day's work, all other things being equal, provides more days of work for every employee." Yet it is a fact that the American Federation of Labor has repeatedly urged the shortening of the work day on this very ground.1 Prof. Fairchild, speaking of child labor, says:

The only reasonable basis of comparison is the total number of children of the given ages in each nativity group in the country. If the author had made this comparison . . . it would have appeared that nearly three times as large a percentage of all children of foreign parents,

1 See Report on Unemployment, by John Koren, in "Waste in Industry," by The Committee on Elimination of Waste in Industry of the Federated Engineering Societies (1921), p. 296.

of the given ages, are employed in the specified occupations as children of native parents (p. 762).

As a matter of fact, the author did make such a comparison in Table 94, on p. 320, with the result that the percentage of children of foreign parents employed in manufactures was found to be exactly the same as that of children of native parents, and not "three times as large," as Prof. Fairchild imagines.

Dr. Foerster interprets the employment of children in large numbers in the Southern mills as the effect of immigration. The Southern manufacturers are compelled to employ children in order to meet the competition of the cheap immigrant labor of the North. Reference to Table 114 shows, however, that the average yearly earnings of adult males in the cotton mills of South Carolina were at the census of manufactures of 1905 about equal to the earnings of children in the cotton mills of Massachusetts ($244 and $233, respectively), and that the earnings of adult males in Pennsylvania were more than double the earnings of adult males in North and South Carolina. It was a case of the native Southerner underbidding the immigrant. The absence of adequate laws against child labor in the South is thus obviously due to the demand for labor, not for cheap labor—adult male labor is cheap enough in the South. In the North, too, child labor was employed in the early days of the cotton manufacturing industry; later, however, with the growth of immigration, the cotton mills secured a supply of adult labor which made it practicable to dispense with child labor (see Chapter XIV).

In reference to pauperism, Dr. Fairchild boldly asserts that it would be difficult to find "statistics which would not go to show that the amount of pauperism among the foreignborn was vastly out of proportion to their total numbers in the population" (p. 762). It does not matter that Tables 106109 do present such statistics, drawn from official sources, and that the Immigration Commission, though unfriendly to immigration, after an investigation which covered the activi

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