reports, is indicative of the general burden that the community is carrying, brought upon it by unrestricted immigration.

(2) The indefinite assertion that "the farmers need help," here or there or somewhere, has been sifted a countless number of times, with the result of finding one definite comprehensive fact. This is, that twice in the year, when the farmer sows his seed and when he reaps his crop, he can employ help; but as a rule he can not, or will not, employ labor the year round. On this point the testimony of John C. Earl, Financial Secretary of the Bowery Mission, is but a repetition of evidence that has been given by scores of other social workers who have investigated the subject. On a certain day, according to Mr. Earl, two Omaha newspapers published a story with flaring headlines to the effect that the Deputy Commissioner of Agriculture of Nebraska had said he knew of cases enough of farmers needing help to give employment to a thousand men from the East if they could be obtained. The Deputy Commissioner named twenty-five farmers who, he said, each needed from five to twenty laborers. A Nebraska newspaper reader sent clippings containing these stories to the Bowery Mission, intimating that the men of the bread line, if they wanted work, ought to go West at once. Mr. Earl wrote to the newspapers, to the farmers they named, and to the Deputy Commissioner of Agriculture, asking for the addresses of farmers needing men. The newspapers could give no addresses, the farmers named said they were supplied, and the official quoted replied that there was all the help needed just then in the State. After the reader has appreciated the inferences from this story, he will naturally inquire why the farmers who need laborers, to be steadily employed, do not apply direct to the many New York philanthropic labor agencies. The reply is that no doubt the few do who are seeking labor to be kept all the year.

(3) As to the government employment agencies in operation in various countries of Europe, American readers continually obtain the results of the observations of newspaper, magazine, official, and philanthropic investigators. Usually such reports are no more than undiscriminating transcriptions of official reports, with superficial descriptions of the functioning of the establishments. These writings as a rule lack comprehensiveness of view and they fail to take in the relative influence of all the employment agencies in operation-trade union, private, government, church, and charitable. They do not account for the existence of each of these forms or for the reasons of the movements of labor in Europe from point to point and from country to country. They see no significance in the adaptability of certain methods to certain countries, nor do they go to the origins of the various forms of the labor exchanges in each country. The writers who describe the big central labor bureaus of Berlin or Munich, for example, omit due weight to the fact that in Germany there are today between 7,000 and 8,000 private registry offices; they do not know how much politics has to do with the bourses du travail in France; they have not followed the criticisms recently made by the trade unionists of the British labor exchanges established two years ago under the official Board of Trade. In the work of the multiplicity of labor bureaus in Europe, any investigator bent on establish

ing a priori conclusions may select sufficient facts to back up any project by which any organization in society, any political party, any capitalistic combine, may further its selfish interests or its alleged philanthropic objects.

(4) The question, "Where would you be but for immigration?" or, "Where would your parents have been but for immigration?" is snapped off at the immigrants of thirty years ago or the children of immigrants of that or an earlier period. The reply is in these facts: Up to 1880 the average arrivals for thirty years had been less than 250,000 a year. Nine-tenths of the immigrants of that time came from the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland or Germany. They spoke the English language or a tongue closely allied to it. A large proportion of them went directly on the land, it being then true that the public domain needed settlers. A considerable percentage came taught in the skilled trades. They could not be used as a means to cut down the American standard of living. They never brought this country to confront the social problems which now vex and torment it-problems associated with illiterate, poverty stricken masses packed in "colonies," strangers to the American spirit and American history, working in slave-gangs for an industrial aristocracy, driven into competition with American labor as their sole means of gaining a livelihood, the highest hope of many of the more thrifty being a return to their home land, with America as nothing to them. The immigration question now is totally different from that of thirty years ago.

(5) Significant basic facts are to be learned from the reports of State and philanthropic labor bureaus now in existence in America:

Massachusetts has three State free-employment offices-at Boston, Springfield, and Fall River. According to the fourth annual report of the director, the positions filled from these offices in 1910 numbered 20,574; in three years over 43,000 individuals were sent to 68,780 positions; cost to the State more than $80,000. The offers of positions were 172,129. Query: Why were only one-fourth of the positions offered filled by the applicants, who numbered 195,135? Were the other three-fourths in the class of offers which will not stand investigation by unemployed wage-workers seeking steady work yielding a living? Were they jobs that were merely casual or seasonal, or that were underpaid? The classification of occupations for the 20,574 positions filled in 1910 may indicate the reply: Domestic and personal service, 11,779; agriculture, 2,004; trade and transportation, 2,770; manufacturing and mechanical pursuits, 3,786. A glance at these figures reveals the whole situation. The State free-employment offices of Massachusetts have for the most part been merely employed in doing a certain small percentage of the work of transferring and retransferring the household and hotel help that must be moved about with the seasons and the comings and goings of householders. On the industries, the influence of these free public agencies-in the third greatest manufacturing State in the Union it is to be noticed-has not been as much as a rain-drop in a barrel of water. Among its more than half a million industrial wage-earners, of whom it might be estimated that 20 per cent change places in a year, only about

one-half of 1 per cent obtained positions through the State free-employment offices.

*

The National Employment Exchange of the State of New York was set up in 1909 by nearly thirty millionaire subscribers to a fund of $100,000. Its first annual report states that from May 12, 1909, to September 30, 1910, it placed 4,120 men. The operating expenses were $24,793; fees, $11,813 (employes, $10,088; employers, $1,725); net loss, $10,622. This exchange has two bureaus, one in State Street near the immigrant landing, and the other in Grand Street, in the heart of the lower East Side. Its effect on the movement of labor, as shown by this report of places filled, was nil. But certain straightforward statements made by the manager outline typical conditions under which laborers and office help (the latter presumably mostly English-speaking) must gain their living in the United States:

"On many orders the low salaries offered (for office help) for the work to be performed makes it impossible to fill them." . . .

"The causes of dissatisfaction, where unquestionably good laborers have been supplied, and who refused to stay on the job, emanate from the lack of proper housing and subsistence; failure to receive the amount of wages believed to be due on pay-day also leads to disputes which cause men to seek other employment. The commissary is not always conducted in the interests of the men, especially when a padrone or some outsider agrees for the privilege to furnish laborers free of charge. Complaints have been numerous not only about extortionate prices being charged for supplies purchased through the commissary, but short weight also being practiced." "Some of the men

who return to the city soon after they were shipped out will tell you that the foreman was too hard to get along with; others will complain about the exorbitant prices charged for commissary supplies; others will say that there was no provision near at hand for purchasing food; others say they quit because of the poor sleeping accommodations in camp, claiming the shanties leaked and were poorly heated, etc.; some object to being vaccinated; others will say that they were robbed of their clothing; others found the work wet when they thought it would be dry; others would not work with a pick and shovel when they supposed they would only chop timber, etc."

Do not these reports, both of State and private agencies, tend to confirm the evidence we have cited to show the mission of the "distribution" movement?

These reports, as we read them, show that the final question with the laborer seeking work anywhere in the United States-with perhaps the exception of a few remote regions, in which the circumstances of timeconsuming distances, high transportation charges, sparse settlement, and uncertain duration of employment are discouraging factors-is not the matter of finding a job. It is the matter of finding even a casual job, to say nothing about steady employment, which will maintain a human being at the American standard of living.

As we have shown, the usual established American methods for supplying American (or English-speaking) migratory labor to any point in the country where labor is needed at American wages are equal to the performance of their task. These methods are, as we have pointed out, trade union bureaus and comradeship, advertising, and regulated private agencies. Of

course, they have to be supplemented by individual hustle, horse-sense, courage, and independence of character.

In the light of our survey of the situation, then, the principal aim and mission of the schemes for immigrant distribution come plainly into view. It is not to supply our country with any needed labor. It is not the building up of any American community. It is not even to assist American labor equally with foreign labor. It is to promote and assist the coming and going steerage passenger regardless of the effect on American labor.

English-speaking labor in the United States can find its way to any job anywhere that will yield a fair living, even if it has to travel in a "box car." The trouble today is that, no matter how it travels, it finds on the job a previous arrival-a man speaking a strange tongue, living with a gang of others in a shack, working at a serf's wages, submitting in a slavish spirit to outrages on him as a human being, and in debt to the agencies. that have found the job for him and paid his way to it.

To add to the irony of the situation, the steamship combine, which is the chief profit-taking interest in this process of debasing American labor, is a foreign enterprise. Its companies have foreign charters; its officers and crews are foreigners; many of its ships are under contract to be used by European governments in case of war. On every transatlantic vessel coming to American ports the official atmosphere is anti-American. The officers in many cases are commissioned officers of foreign navies, they and the petty officers and even the serving stewards all sneer at America. All the world sees through the colossal game that the European powers and their high financiers are working on the United States-that is to say, all the world except those Americans who are still caught by the balderdash of a patriotism requiring us to admit the poor and oppressed of Europe and the far East until American labor shall be reduced to the European level, or who are imposed upon by a mawkish philanthropy that would finish by substituting for the traditional independence of the self-maintaining and self-respecting American wage-worker the broken spirit, the semi-pauper existence, and the slum habits of the class of European laborers that now mostly make up the cargoes of the steamships in the combine.

Preparations should immediately be begun by all central bodies for the celebration of Labor Day. Agitate, educate, demonstrate!

"I was once in a union, but somehow I fell out of the ranks." Whose fault was that? You will be welcome back, no matter whose the fault.

Certainly, you can afford the price of this magazine-if you put it on your list as a necessity. Put it high up on the list-above those luxuries that have never brought back your money to you.

THE BLOT UPON CIVILIZATION.

By JOHN B. POWELL.