low wages are paid, into the former. English emigration, Hobson remarks, begins to fall off after 1884. In that year 242,000 emigrants left England. In 1900, only 169,000 English people left the mother country. German emigration reached its maximum between 1880 and 1890 with a total of 1,453,000 emigrants. In the course of the following two decades it fell to 544,000 and 341,000 respectively.
On the other hand there was an increase in the number of workers coming into Germany from Austria, Italy, Russia and other countries. According to the 1907 census, there were 1,342,294 foreigners in Germany, of whom 440,800 were industrial workers and 257,329 were agricultural workers.88
In France, "a notable proportion" of mining workers consists of foreigners: Polish, Italian and Spanish.89 In the United State, immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe provide the most poorly-paid work hands, and American workers provide the highest percentage of overseers or of better-paid workers.90 Imperialism has thus a tendency to create privileged sections amongst the workers, too, and to detach them from the main proletarian masses.
It is worth noticing that in Britain, the tendency of imperialism to divide the toilers in this way, to encourage opportunism amongst them, and to give rise to a temporary organic decay in the working class movement, showed itself much earlier than the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. For two big distinctive features of imperialism applied to Britain from midway through the 19th century: vast colonial posses-
