men luxuriate is strikingly described; and he hastens hither, to be disillusioned and to join the growing ranks of the reckless and radically discontented. With our prohibitory tariff against goods, if we wish to repress the tremendous immigration of most undesirable elements, we must declare war not only against commerce, but against international comity, and arrest men as well as packs of sheep's wool, tin dinner pails, and coat buttons. Mr. Lodge, of Massachusetts, evidently appreciates, judging from the bill that he introduced into the last Congress, that our laws must be strong and stringent enough to stop men as well as packing cases on our quays.

A joyous shout went up from the chief advocates of the McKinley Bill, after its passage, when the cable brought news that Europe was filled with rumors of industries that had been ruined by the loss of their American market. Was that really good news for the American workingmen? Our law closes a European shop and throws out of employment thousands of workmen; with land monopoly, costly governments, dense populations, few opportunities for advancement, and a restrictive caste system, they have in many cases to choose between the poorhouse and the emigrant ship. That ship sails, in nearly all instances, to the United States, and her hunger-driven cargo-" the pauper labor of Europe "-is soon in sharp and deadly competition with the American workingman. Oh, but our dreaded rival, the foreign manufacturer, whom you must fear equally with his workmen-have we not put him out of our way? Yes, perhaps, but only to place him in a still more dangerous opposition to our best interests. He closes his factory, counts his gains, and goes neither to the emigrant ship nor to the poorhouse; but he invests his money in a syndicate to purchase American lands or industries, and lives contented and happy thereafter on the fruits of the labor of his American workers. He may curse and detest American institutions, but he must bless American money and consider that under a frowning front, after all, Mr. McKinley is his chief benefactor. American toilers on Illinois farms, on Wyoming cattle ranches, in Colorado mines, in California fruit plantations, in Oregon forests, and in industries generally throughout the country are "protected" against "the degraded serfs " of

Europe, while giving their hardest labor and best skill to benefit the detested foreigner against whom we inveigh during presidential campaigns. Is it a great national blessing when these gentlemen move their manufacturing plants to our country, bringing, despite our contract-labor law, a whole force of foreign workers, wrenched from their native land by the action of our tariff laws? Is their arrival a benefit to American labor? In some very highly protected occupations a considerable portion of the force consists of foreigners who followed a transplanted industry.* But the American farmer feeds them and is benefited-how? His prices are fixed in the land they left, and he gains no money by feeding them in New Jersey instead of in Austria, Italy, Wales, France, or England..

It would be impossible, in the limits of this article, to set forth the startling figures of foreign ownership of American realty, industries, and corporate interests. The evils of this ownership are generally admitted by leading men of both political parties -such men as Senators Carlisle, Edmunds, and Reagan, Representatives Holman, Payson, and Oates, and many others. When this octopus of alien ownership, largely encouraged by our commercial warfare on mankind through abnormal tariffs, comes to fasten its tentacles on the land, the Republic will be in great danger. The smal freeholder, the mainstay of American institutions, will then give place to the wretched dependent of a foreign landlord. That landlord may in time control his tenant's political actions; for the true sovereign is the lord of the land, the man who owns the soil on which others live. In that day our immigration bureaus will be spying out the foreign contract tenant, as well as the laborer.

There are so many ways of avoiding the foreign contract labor provision of the statute book, that at its best it can never be very effective. What contract is necessary to secure the services of an immigrant who comes to this country under inducement to work in the only industry where possibly he could secure employment? Suppose a European mill-owner should to-day address his assembled employees as follows: "This shop closes to-morrow, owing to the fact that the McKinley Bill has *See the reports of Congressional committees.

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closed our market in the United States. Next week I open a similar establishment in New Jersey, ten miles from the landingplace in New York. Any of you who may emigrate to America will be given first preference for employment. Mr. Hurryem, our foreman, is agent for the Occidental Line of steamers and will give you easy terms." Let every man of them land in New York with five dollars in his pocket, and see the result, in spite of our most carefully devised restrictive immigration laws. Suppose that when they get to the transplanted mill they find the American workers on a strike against a sweeping reduction of wages; what clause of the McKinley Bill will protect these citizens from being supplanted by the invaders? As I write, the following cable dispatch may be seen in the newspapers:

"The effect of the McKinley Bill on the mother-of-pearl workers of Vienna has been serious. Official reports show that out of 6,000 only 1,500 are following their trade. The rest are making a precarious living as best they can."

Making a precarious living"! Forty-five hundred Austrian fellow-men will soon be clamoring at the doors of the American button factories, and saying to the owners: "Let us in; lower than the lowest price you now pay for labor, we offer ours to swell your profits. Our scanty means, gotten in a 'precarious way, are expended. The wolf is not at our doors (our only door is that of the almshouse), but he has already fastened his fangs upon us, our wives, and our little ones. We were happy in our native land; we loved our homes, our institutions, our traditions, customs, and habits; but you reached your powerful arm over the sea and took away our bread, and now, perforce, we stand here at your door and beg for work. We did you no harm in the dear old land we left; we ate your wheat and pork, and thought kindly of you and wished you well. We see your own workers here clamoring for work themselves; we are their brothers and do not wish to interfere with them, but hunger is cruel, and these women and children sitting here in your streets, dressed in heavy, honest, European woolens, are tired and hot and very weary under this American summer sun." This is not fancy. Read of the first fruits of a prohibitory tariff.

The Bureau of Statistics reports the total number of immi

grants arrived at the ports of the United States during the periods named as follows:

I conclude that a very high or substantially prohibitory tariff in the United States is bound to force, in spite of all mere restrictive measures, a large, unhealthy, undesirable, abnormal immigration of those who care nothing, and desire to know less, about our citizenship, an immigration which is inimical to American labor and contrary to the best interests of the whole country. I conclude, also, that it will lead eventually to a dangerous alien ownership of American properties and to alien control of our industries and domestic commerce.

I am fully aware that those who prophesy that economic disaster will follow the violation of natural laws find little favor in our country, because the evils of vicious laws are not immediately apparent. Our country is young and strong and, as yet, robust. Like a strong, lusty young man it can break many of nature's laws with no immediate penalty; but outraged nature overcomes the greatest of giants unless reparation and amendment take the place of audacious and continued violation of her rules. The great steamships coming up New York Bay packed with human beings in all garbs, bearing the impress of all lands, speaking all tongues, whether coming here of free will or forced here with no will, are object lessons which cannot be igncred, and which may suggest thoughts of better things than extensions of the principle of Chinese Exclusion Acts or revivals of the absurd nativism of a past age.

WILLIAM MCADOO.

THE GREAT COUNT OF 1890.

ON the first day of June, 1890, under a provision of the national Constitution, nearly forty-nine thousand enumerators be gan the great decennial work of counting the inhabitants of the United States; in cities and towns, on farms and ranches, in mining and lumbering camps, along railways and rivers, upon the shore, and high up in mountain ravines. It was the eleventh census. The first had been taken in 1790, the year after the formation of the government under the Constitution. The eleventh was, therefore, to show the changes of a hundred years—the first century of the nation's life. The occasion was one which should have been of the deepest interest to a great, free people.

The importance of the work would seem to have required that the enumeration be opened by a presidential proclamation, invoking the public attention, calling upon all citizens to aid the officers of the law, and demanding, in the name of patriotism and honor, that political and sectional passions and prejudices be laid aside while this great constitutional function was being performed. It is difficult to understand the failure, from the beginning, to usher in the national census in this way. When one considers what the census is to our people, that it is a condition precedent of our form of government, and that by it are to be apportioned both direct taxation and political representation, it would seem as if the mere proprieties of the occasion demanded an executive proclamation, even though no more of practical virtue were expected from it than is supposed to emanate from an annual proclamation appointing a day of thanksgiving and praise or one of fasting and humiliation. But when it is further considered that the census is pre-eminently a work which depends, for its integrity and efficiency, upon public interest and attention, and upon the cheerful co-operation of all classes of citizens and all sorts of people, the failure referred to becomes altogether inexplicable.

When first it was my fortune to be assigned to the superin