it cannot produce a benevolence that is worthy of the name, for it is synonymous with sentimentalism. It is not the duty of the state to attempt to make its citizens happy by adopting some economic theory that has never been tried practically, nor by abolishing private property; nor by distributing arbitrarily equally to the just and unjust; nor by restricting the free play of true individualism ; nor by taxing the successful and the prosperous unjustly to feed the drones and the sluggards of society; nor by becoming a religious teacher or a paternal guardian,—thus relieving the individual from the necessity of personal and heroic virtues like honesty, industry, and thrift.

But it is the duty of the Christian state to throw its protecting arms about the humblest and the poorest; to protect the weak from the strong; to permit any man, no matter how lowly and despised, to be the equal before the law of any other man, however rich and powerful; to see that each one has the right to labor and to enjoy the fruits of his labor, provided always that his efforts be put forth with due regard for the rights of others; to keep from starvation those who are mentally or physically unable to work; to guard the individual in the possession of his natural rights, —life, liberty, property, and reputation.

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Christianity is not simply the science of manhood and womanhood: it is the science of statehood; it is the art of social control; it is the true philosophy of government. its very genius, it gives free play to that highest individualism, the educated reason moved by a regenerated will; for, as Kant says: "Of all things that can possibly be conceived, one thing alone can be called perfectly good, and that is a good-will." It was good-will that led the Shepherd to leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness and find the lost sheep; it is good-will that leads him now to lay down his life for the sheep. The light of the Christian religion must now be concentrated upon social problems, and its life must be spent in the attainment of just social conditions.

ARTICLE VIII.

THE RESTRICTION OF IMMIGRATION.

BY EDWARD W. BEMIS.

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READERS of the BIBLIOTHECA SACRA are aware of the agitation in Congress in favor of the bill, that has already passed the House by a large majority, that would keep out all immigrants between sixteen and sixty years of age who cannot read and write in the English or some other language. This McCall bill may not become a law at this session. senator has written a friend that, in view of the coming elections, Congress will pass no bill that has two sides to it! Yet the interest in such proposed legislation is growing not only among the members of the A. P. A., but among econ omists, publicists, and even leaders of organized labor, and may ere long lead to positive enactment.

The secretary of the Immigration Restriction League, with its headquarters in Boston, finds in an article of the writer's in the Andover Review of March, 1888, the first advocacy of such a bill, and he therefore feels an especial interest in a brief consideration of it here.

The first national legislation was an act of July, 1864, entitled "An Act to Encourage Immigration," and providing not only for the protection of new arrivals from imposition, but exempting them from military service, and allowing them. before coming to make a contract for any term, not exceeding one year, to repay the expenses of coming. This law was repealed in 1868, and there was no further national legislation on immigration till 1882, but many Western States kept immigration agents in Europe to secure settlers. In

these and previous years, our immigration was almost entirely of Germanic stock, such as Germans, Norwegians, Swedes, and British. The chief exception—the Irish-had long been under Anglo-Saxon training. These kinsmen of ours not only helped to fill our armies in the Civil War (and in case of the Irish our police and aldermanic bodies since then!), but they came when there was a greater apparent need of unskilled labor than now, and they brought with them some familiarity with local self-government, even though unacquainted with democratic control in national affairs.

In the years following 1830, however, the American birth-rate declined faster than immigration increased, and it is the at least very plausible theory of General Francis A. Walker, our eminent economist, that one great factor in this rapid decline of the American birth-rate was the unwillingness to bring children into competition with the unkempt children of the immigrant, who, through no fault of their own, could not quickly escape the results of heredity and early environment. The words of General Walker, in the August, 1891, Forum, are worth quoting :

"Throughout the Northeastern and the Northern Middle States, into which, during the period under consideration (1830-60) the new-comers poured in in such numbers, the standard of material living, of general intelligence, of social decency, had been singularly high. Life, even at its hardest, had always had its luxuries; the babe had been a thing of beauty, to be delicately nurtured and proudly exhibited; the growing child had been decently dressed, at least for school and church; the house had been kept in order, at whatever cost, the gate hung, the shutters in place, while the front yard had been made to bloom with simple flowers; the village church, the public school-house, had been the best which the community, with great exertions and sacrifices, could erect and maintain. Then came the foreigner, making his way into the little village, bringing -small blame to him!--not only a vastly lower standard of living, but too often an actual present incapacity even to understand the refinements of life and thought in the community in which he sought a home. Our people had to look upon houses that were mere shells for human habitations, the gate unhung, the shutters flapping or falling, green pools in the yard, babes and young children rolling about half naked or worse, neglected, dirty, unkempt. Was there not in this [a] sentimental reason VOL. LIII. NO. 211.

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strong enough to give a shock to the principle of population? But there was, besides, an economic reason for a check to the native increase. The American shrank from the industrial competition thus thrust upon him. He was unwilling himself to engage in the lowest kind of day labor with these new elements of the population; he was even more unwilling to bring sons and daughters into the world to enter into that competition."

It is by no means proven, that, as held by some eminent writers and many flippant paragraphers, the Irish immigrant. merely forced the Yankee mill-worker upward, and that the French Canadian in turn did the same favor to the Irish, and is now being similarly elevated by the pressure of the still cheaper Italian and Hungarian. Neither is it true, as commonly supposed, that no one would do our rough work of mining, sewer digging, railroad construction, etc., were it not for the new arrivals from Europe. Perhaps the American would demand higher pay, and thus stimulate more use of labor-saving machinery, but this every lover of humanity should desire. Rather, the conception that it takes a mean man to do mean work probably arises from the class of immigrants that come to us fitted for little else save rough work.

It is also a great popular fallacy that we need immigration to sustain our physical vigor. The refutation of this appears in Justin Winsor's "Narrative and Critical History of America," vol. iv., where Professor Shaler, of Harvard, shows statistically, from our army records, that in the Civil War, those of native American stock, running back two centuries, such as the Maine and Wisconsin woodsman, the Western Reserve farmers, the Kentuckian, Tennessean, and Virginian, in both Northern and Southern armies, were far more rugged on the march or in camp and hospital than the more brawny looking immigrants.

Yet far be it from the purpose of the writer to minimize the excellent characteristics and great benefits to us of our German, Scandinavian, and British immigrants. For example, the common charge that the foreign-born furnish an undue

proportion of the inmates of our prisons is most unfair, for it ignores the fact that a greater proportion of our foreignborn than of our native population are males between sixteen and forty years of age, when most crime is committed. Of the males over eighteen in 1890, the foreign-born were 26.38 per cent, while of the male prisoners only 26.22 per cent were born abroad.

Neither is it correct to ascribe most of the misgovernment of our cities to the immigrant, since educational qualifications for the suffrage have largely met this difficulty in Massachusetts, and should be adopted elsewhere, as also more stringent methods of naturalization. In Massachusetts no one can register, unless he can readily read a paragraph in English of the State Constitution, drawn by lot from a box. At the national conferences of civic reform organizations, it is quite common to hear mayors and prominent citizens of cities having a particularly large proportion of native Americans describe the political abuses of their municipalities as equal to those of most other places of the same size that have a much larger foreign-born population. Our most dangerous class by far, politically, is a few of our native American and often church-supporting millionaires in each of our large cities who bribe aldermen, assessors, and legislators, or otherwise corrupt our institutions, in order to preserve or increase monopolistic gains. Yet the presence among us of a large class ignorant of our institutions, and easily controlled by the saloon keeper and the pot-house politician, renders reform somewhat difficult. "Is dat de man what gives de beer? 'Cause I votes for de man what gives de beer and de two dollar," said a Tonawanda, N. Y., lumbershover to a friend of mine as she passed near the polling booth. Professor McCook, of Yale, indeed, finds the same political degradation among many native American farmers in old Connecticut. And do not many of us vote for what we