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their new constitution proposes to recognize the independence of the states in a far higher degree than that in which it has been allowed to exist in Canada, yet it vests the virtual control of the whole railway system of Australia in the federal power, which will be a shock to your American minds, whether north or south of the Canadian border line.

A reason why I should have wished that Australia should have been made one by her new constitution concerns the inferiority of some of her existing Parliaments and the brilliant ability of some of her statesmen at present confined within spheres too small for them. Sir Henry Parkes is too big for New South Wales; Mr. Deakin's sympathies are too wide for Victorian limits; and Australia, which might produce a federal cabinet of seven members of the highest powers, with a federal opposition of seven leading statesmen ready to take their place and of almost equal fame, fritters her men away upon a number of small Parliaments, in some of which the level is very low. Coalition governments have succeeded in Victoria and have done something for that colony, and are being tried in Queensland and some others; but a coalition government for all Australia in a strong federal Parliament might bring about an era of social progress and a trial of state socialistic experiments such as the world has not yet seen-and probably would do so. The great majority of Australians have confidence in the power of the state to do much for the people, and in the wisdom of its exercising this power. You in the United States; the Canadians across their border; the continental governments, are far behind even old England in this respect, and it would be of advantage to the world that Australia, which is much before us all, should have the opportunity of putting its doctrines into practice upon the largest scale.

I cannot better conclude this article than by stating that if Australia comes together she will start as the eighth state in the world in wealth and revenue and trade, and indeed in all points except population. Her population is but four millions, but they are four millions of the best.

CHARLES W. DILKE

IMMIGRATION AND THE TARIFF.

A LARGE number of people in the United States who have no latent prejudices against foreigners as a class, are at this moment seriously considering the wisdom of a stringent restriction of immigration. They affect to believe that the phenomenal assimilative powers of the Republic have at last reached their limits, and that the digestive functions of the state are being seriously disordered by the wholesale reception of incongruous, crude, and antagonistic elements of population. They insist that, vast as is the area of the Republic, and great as are its assimilative powers, they are not equal to the voracity of the national mouth at the barge office in New York. They are seriously discussing the wisdom of extending to certain other countries some features of the Chinese Exclusion Act, if that be possible. In some instances foreign-born workmen join in demanding the general restriction of immigration, while representatives in Congress from the South, where the foreign-born vote is comparatively light-men who cannot, therefore, be accused of pandering to naturalized citizens-are among the sturdiest opponents of restrictive measures. This latter fact may be attributed partly to a general dislike of anything antagonistic to the broad liberality of the Jeffersonian school, and partly to a dread of the numerical or political supremacy of the Negroes. Besides, a man looking on the vast, fertile, and as yet sparselypeopled sections of the South-west is not apt to dread unrestricted immigration as much as he who daily views the scenes of our great cities and those of mining and railroad centers.

It is not my purpose to express any opinion on the wisdom or the folly of leaving immigration unrestricted, but I certainly have no part in any general distrust of the foreigners who share our citizenship, nor in any prejudice against immigrants from other lands. The adult man sound in body and mind, of good character and industrious habits, intelligent, with some elemen

tary knowledge of our institutions, whether he is skilled or unskilled, who comes to the United States deliberately in order to better himself as a man, intending to live and die here, to rear children, to make a home, and to become a devoted and loyal citizen, is a great national blessing to us, and should be received with a hearty welcome, from whatever land he may come. He is a rich gift from the land which suckled, nursed, reared, fed, protected, and trained him until it handed him over to us a ready-made" man, with two strong hands, a clear head, and an honest heart. A hearty welcome to him, whether he be Saxon or Celt, Norseman, Latin, Slav, or Teuton! Let him ply his strong arms and skilled fingers with all his energy, study our ways, learn our language, be of us and with us, and we will be for him against the world.

There is, however, another immigrant who is not desirable. It is not so much his individuality that weighs against him as the circumstances that fling him, as it were, on our shores. He is the unfortunate wretch who, without choice or provision, is chased by starvation and immediate necessity, together with his more wretched family, into the crowded hold of a great steamship, to seek the market closed by a prohibitory tariff to the goods which he produced in his native land. He comes here, in most instances, seeking temporary relief from grinding poverty, with intention to return with his gain to the land of his birth. We have shut out the cheap foreign watch, blanket, tin sheet, glass pane, and steel rail; but the cheaper foreign worker, hand to hand with hunger, underbids American labor in the home market that we boast was made for it alone. We have reared around our custom houses, by our inhibition of foreign goods, adamantine walls high enough to stop the free movement of the winds of heaven, and deep enough to shut out natural gas or drinking water from Canada and Mexico; but around our immigrant depots, against the great swelling tide of immigration, we have strung a few statutory cobwebs!

However conservative one may be regarding sweeping tariffreduction, and however little in sympathy with radical opposi tion to moderate protection, yet he must concede that immigration and the tariff are closely interwoven and should be

considered relatively as affecting each other. In the holds of the ships from which we have excluded foreign freight humanity takes its place. If we wish to furnish a paradisaical home market to American labor, should we not follow a prohibitory tariff against foreign goods by a general exclusion law against foreign men? If we do not prohibit foreign workers, is it not a crime against our own people to mislead these aliens with the pleasant fictions intended for home consumption? Suppose it were stated by Italian immigration agents that it is made obligatory by law that every laboring man in the United States shall receive eight dollars for every eight hours' work, while, at the same time, laboring men in Italy are receiving eight cents per day and the price of passage in "tramp" steamships to this country is eight dollars. On this statement of the situation in a steamship advertisement, the numbers that would augment our industrial army from Italy would depend almost wholly on the capacity of the steamers and on the number of Italian workmen who could secure the passage money. Now suppose that on arriving here they should soon discover that indirectly there is collected from them every day as a tax on the necessaries of life, if they live as American workers do, seven dollars and ninety cents, giving them two cents a day to compensate for the radical change in their condition of life and for the difference between the climate of Pittsburgh and that of Palermo-would you be surprised if, thus disillusioned, vast bodies of them should swell the armies of the discontented, and, engaging in riot, should be shot down by private police or public militia?

In this discussion it must be remembered that electricity and steam, triple-expansion engines and fast express trains have combined to make the whole world very small and neighborly. These great, fast steamships rushing up our bay, swarming with human beings who crowd into our free labor market with pressing necessity forcing them to lowest prices, are boring holes with their twin screws in the logic of the McKinley Bill. "Well," say the advocates of the prohibitory tariff, "we will add to the laws that restrict immigration. We will have consular examinations of intending immigrants, or we will compel all candidates for admission into our country to speak the English language."

Aside from the facts that undue restrictions, such as linguistic tests, are not in keeping with American principles, and that consular examinations, unless an enormous clerical force is employed, are well-nigh impracticable, nothing short of exclusion, backed by an army of government detectives and a cordon of gunboats, will ever successfully keep out the tide which very high and stiff artificial barriers against the interchange of commodities are bound to create. The present law against certain classes of immigrants is, I believe, so far as the port of New York is concerned, well and zealously enforced, and yet those excluded are mere drops from the great sea which flows over our land.

If, for instance, the present prohibitory tariff should effectually close the American market to the product of the Welsh tin mills or of the Austrian pearl-button factories, the Welsh and Austrian operatives whose home manufactories would consequently be closed, and who would be forced to come to our "home market "-with intention to return home again as soon as possible, with some little resentment, perhaps, against us, and certainly with no love for our country-would perhaps meet the requirements of the most stringent restrictive immigrant law, and yet be a most undesirable addition to our population. Such an immigrant is forced to come; he comes sullenly and regretfully; he does not come intending to stay or to be assimilated: he comes under the pain and pinch of a necessity which our laws have forced upon him; he lands here generally with a family dependent upon him and with little or no means; and yet he is not a pauper within the meaning of the law. He lingers where he lands, unless an employer selects him from among the vast number of our own unemployed and pays his fare to a distance because, in the free and unprotected labor market, he has underbid the native workman. Frequently he becomes a chattel, a serf, with a number instead of a name, a piece of brutalized, degraded, human machinery, consigned in a freight car to some great corporation. Or, as in the case of the supposed Italian workman alluded to above, he has read on the dead walls of European cities the steamship advertisements in which, in the glowing periods and resplendent imagery of the " spellbinders" of our election campaigns, the Eden in which American working

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