Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 66.djvu/178

migration of the negroes to the cities—a result which those familiar with the conditions of negroes now congested in cities can not fail to view with the greatest alarm. Lastly, the more widely we scatter the newer immigrants, the more widespread will be the effect of the competition with the lower grades of aliens in causing a decrease in the birth rate among the older portion of our population. American fathers and mothers, as the late Gen. Francis A. Walker first pointed out, and as leading authorities have since reiterated, naturally shrink from exposing their sons and daughters to competition with those who are contented with lower wages and lower standards of living; and therefore these sons and daughters are never born. The agricultural distribution of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, and from Asia, will hasten still more the replacement of the native by foreign stock.

7. Agricultural Distribution of Immigrants will not solve the Immigration Problem.—But few of those who are now urging the necessity of relieving the city slum burden by distributing the slum population realize that such distribution will not, and can not, of itself, lead to any relief, as long as the tide of new immigration flows on unchecked. As Professor John E. Commons, one of the leading authorities on immigration in the United States, has recently said:^[1]

To relieve the pressure in the cities without restricting the number admitted only opens the way for a still larger immigration; for, strangely enough, emigration has not relieved the pressure of population in Europe. In no period of their history, with the exception of Ireland, have the populations of Europe increased at a greater rate than during the last half century of migration to America. As a relief for current immigration, agricultural distribution is not promising.

It needs but little thought to convince any one that were it not for the continued influx of hundreds of thousands of ignorant and poverty-stricken aliens each year, there would, in few years, remain no such serious problem of Jewish charity, or of Italian charity, or of any other charity in our country as at present. It is a fact, so obvious as to need no argument in support of it, that the more we try to reduce the pressure of competition among the alien immigrants in our congested city slums, the more we shall encourage other aliens, as ignorant and as poor, to come over and take the places thus vacated. Distribution and a reduction in the numbers of our immigrants: both of these remedies are needed. Private charitable agencies are not likely to have money enough to carry out any scheme of distribution on a large scale; that will be attended to by the capitalistic interests which want the cheapest labor obtainable. Charitable societies and individuals should do their best to see that this distri-

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1. The Chautauquan, May, 1904, 224.