Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/185

Rh process of our early immigration brought to us. Only men and women of such qualities could and would face the long and dreary sea voyage and brave the peril of the unknown new world. Only the man of hope, of ambition, poor in the wealth of the world, but rich in determination, force and foresight, was suited for such migration. So too, it often was the leader of the advance movement of civilization in Europe who, because of political oppression, led a vanguard of the best blood of his country to share the bounties of nature in America.

But the day in which we can rely for prosperity upon nature's bounty is past. Her resources have been explored and divided up. And while new resources continue to be brought to light, they are the possession of the few, and offer little of hope to the hungry immigrant from the old world.

We can not, therefore, depend exclusively upon nature and the raw force and determination of our people to maintain or continue the old-time progress and high position of America. More and more our dependence must be placed upon ourselves rather than upon nature alone, and in particular upon a character acquired through training. The new industrial life, it has been said, demands skill. If America is to advance in industry, she must face this demand; her people must be trained and trained industrially.

If such is a true statement of the general character of the productive process of to-day, it is pertinent to inquire if the two streams of humanity, which furnish the labor necessary to production, are fitted to the more specialized demands of this process. Is our labor skilled? And what are its means of attaining skill?

Let us consider first the stream of immigration. The report of the commissioner general of immigration for 1907 shows that out of the total number of 1,285,000 coming to this country from other parts of the world in the year 1906, about eighty-three per cent, were without skill requisite to enter a skilled industry. If we eliminate from this number the women, children, aged and such other persons as are described as having no occupation at all, there remains fifty-nine per cent, of the total who are of industrial age and sex and yet are distinctly unskilled laborers. A large number, too, of those excluded are women who will enter unskilled trades, and many are children who will begin to earn at the earliest possible time in unskilled employments.

The fact that such a large proportion of the immigrant population is unskilled is inevitable. It is necessary only to recall that the great influx of the present and recent past is from central and southern Europe, from regions in which the opportunity to acquire skill is comparatively slight, and where the call for skill is not yet dominant.

If it be agreed, then, that the stream of immigration is pouring a mass of unskilled labor into our country, consider what is the case in