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.

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. In 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 Southern and 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

of the native supply. Absence of immigrants is a sign of a dull labor market.

To be sure, the rise in wages is paralleled by a similar movement of prices. The employer of labor seeks to recoup the advance in wages by advancing the price of his product to the consumer. When the advance in the price of manufactured products becomes general, the wage-earner as a consumer is forced in effect to give up a part or all of his gain in the money rate of wages. The increased cost of living then stimulates further demands for advances in wages. Since combinations of capital in all fields of industry have reduced competition among employers of labor to a minimum, the wage-earners have been at a disadvantage in this continuous bargaining. In general it has been observed by economists that wages, as a rule, do not rise as fast as prices. That this rule holds true irrespective of immigration, is illustrated by the movement of wages and prices during the Civil War. With the exception of the first year, the period was one of prosperity in every branch of industry. The wage-earners were apparently in a favorable situation. The army drew hundreds of thousands of workers from industrial pursuits, while immigration declined. There were at that time no immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, nor was there any oversupply of unskilled labor. Yet while the depreciation of the currency caused a rapid increase in the cost of living, money wages did not keep pace with prices. In other words, real wages decreased. It must be noted that during the war a lively labor agitation was going on; strikes were usually successful. Withal, labor was unable to win increases in wages commensurate with the increased cost of living.

Among the factors tending to depress the rate of wages child labor holds a prominent place. The most significant fact to be noted concerning the relation between child labor and immigration is the large proportion of children employed in factories in States where there is practically no immigrant population, whereas the lowest per cent is found

in New York, which is overrun by immigrants. The growth of manufacturing industries in the South being restricted by the natural increase of her native population, the manufacturers, in order to extend their operations, must resort to the employment of children, as did their predecessors in New England a century ago, before immigration came to supply the needs of American industry. This situation is by no means confined to the South. Absence of foreign immigration has created a demand for the labor of native American children in the canneries and shoe factories of rural and semi-rural Missouri. The principal inducement for locating new shoe factories in rural sections of Missouri appears to be the availability of the cheap labor of native American women and children, who can underbid the male immigrants employed in the shoe factories of Massachusetts. On the other hand, taking the United States as a whole, we find that during the ten-year period from 1899 to 1909, with its unprecedented immigration, the average number of children employed in factories did not increase, while their relative number decreased.

An unerring measure of the effects of immigration on labor conditions is furnished by the length of the working day. Aside from the benefits of shorter hours for the physical and mental well-being of the wage-earner, every reduction of the hours of labor, even when not accompanied by an increase of the daily or weekly wage, is equivalent to an increase of the hourly wage. Going back to the beginnings of the factory system in the United States, when the operatives were sons and daughters of American farmers, we find that the hours of labor in the factories were from sunrise to sunset, the same as on the farms to-day. The retirement of the native element and their replacement by Irish immigrants was followed by a reduction of the hours of labor in the textile mills. In recent years the mills have been run with a polyglot help made up of representatives of all the races of Southern and Eastern Europe and Asiatic Turkey. Compared with the time when the operatives were mostly,