Page:The National Geographic Magazine Vol 16 1905.djvu/37

Rh qualifications, to enter the service. From top to bottom, it should be placed upon a scientific basis, entirely outside the control of politics.

The voluntary, unsought, and unsolicited emigration to the United States has been the means of building up an intellectual, energetic, and prosperous community. Our country has received, not the high born, but the strong and always the oppressed, whose past history made them all the more appreciate their condition here.

The children of the colonial period were pushed upwards in the social scale by the immigrants, who in turn push each other upward as they come in. It is not true that the native of four or five decades ago stepped from one occupation to the other. The upward movement was gradual, and the promotion was rather that of generations than individuals.

Science and invention are working together to abolish occupations at the lower end of the scale and creating new ones at the top. The laborer of Europe has his place in the economy of our age. His whole drift is upward, in spite of all the counteracting influences to the contrary.

Since 1850 the immigrants have always been found on the side of law, public decency, and public morals, as instanced in the response to the call for troops in the Civil War, the agitations for change in money standards, etc. Ever since 1870 those states having the preponderance of aliens could be relied upon to vote on the right side in moral questions in the same proportion in which aliens existed in their community.

In what I have said I have tried to be fair, but I cannot close without saying that our hospitality is abused, and by reason of our defective laws and the general knowledge of the means to evade them in Europe we are receiving an increasing number whose coming will do us no good, but harm.

We have no right to oppose needful measures of legislative relief out of sympathy for the sufferings of the people thus seeking admission to our shores, or out of respect to the traditions which up to now have caused this country to be regarded as an asylum.

There is only one Ellis Island in the world; no other country has its mate, because none offers the inducements to the poor of the world that we do. Let us thank God that this is so and pray that we may be able to keep it so, and that the twentieth century may bring to America the fruition of all its hopes, and the standard of progress and freedom which its history has inspired be the torch that will light the world in the same path.

OUR IMMIGRATION DURING 1904

O one can read the report for 1904 of the Commissioner General of Immigration, Frank P. Sargent, without being seriously impressed with the laxity of our present immigration laws and the urgent need of more stringent regulation of our immigration. The number of immigrants for 1905 bids fair to reach the one million mark. Only a few less than 10,000 landed at New York in two days in November, the least popular season of the year for newcomers. The following facts are taken from Mr. Sargent's report:

The striking and significant feature of the table of immigrants for 1904 is that the chief diminution is shown in the arrivals from Austria-Hungary, amounting to 28,855, and from Italy,