Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/682

 666 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

English factories ; of these, only 600 reached the age of thirty; and their sufferings, M. Nifti adds, are evidenced by the occurrence of "something which antiquity never saw, and which is still rare in our day — the suicide of children."

One more subject, intimately connected with the interests of the laboring classes, must here be considered — the question of immigration. Capital, of course, constantly seeks to augment itself at the least possible expense, and, where the number of workers it requires is not cheaply produced, it will import them, thus defeating the good results that the prudent native laborer might have anticipated from his moderation. The argument has been advanced, and statistical data quoted in corroboration thereof, that countries where the birth-rate is low and the popu- lation increases slowly or not at all are only making room for the redundant numbers of overpopulated countries, which are ever " ready to pour into the vacant places." ' In the United Kingdom, where the native population has been growing very rapidly, the number of foreigners has never exceeded 0.006 of the total population, or 6 aliens for every 1,000 inhabitants,' and in Ger' many the proportion was only 8.8 in 1890; while in France, in the year 1886, there were 30 foreigners per 1,000 population, and in the United States, 143 and 148 in 1880 and 1890, respect- ively .^ A comparison of the increase of the native and the for- eign population in the latter country makes it manifest that, in proportion as immigration has increased, the rate of growth of the native population has been very considerably reduced.*

These facts, as said before, seem to show that the population of a country will be fatally kept at a certain level, whether the

' G. Drage, "Alien Immigration," in Journal of the Royal Society of Statistics, 1895, Vol. LVIII, pp. 5, 8.

'The proportions for the years 1841, '51, '61, '71, and '81 were 1.3, 2.3,3.5, 5.2, and 4.4, respectively. (MuLHALL, s. v. "Emigration," p. 248.) In 1891 it was, as stated by Mr. Drage, 5-8.

3 G. Drage, as above, p. 13.

'See figures given by Carroll D. Wright in "Lessons from the (1890) Census," in Popular Science Monthly, Vol. XL, p. 369, and Vol. XLI, p. 760. Those given by MuLHALL (x. ». "Population," p. 451) are very different. I do not know the reason for the exceedingly great discrepancy. It is to be regretted that Mr. Mul- hall's collection of data is somewhat indiscriminate and undigested.