i74 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



migration of the negroes to the cities — a result which those familiar 

 with the conditions of negroes now congested in cities can not fail to 

 view with the greatest alarm. Lastly, the more widely we scatter the 

 newer immigrants, the more widespread will be the effect of the com- 

 petition with the lower grades of aliens in causing a decrease in the 

 birth rate among the older portion of our population. American fathers 

 and mothers, as the late Gen. Francis A. Walker first pointed out, 

 and as leading authorities have since reiterated, naturally shrink from 

 exposing their sons and daughters to competition with those who are 

 contented with lower wages and lower standards of living; and there- 

 fore these sons and daughters are never born. The agricultural dis- 

 tribution of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, and from 

 Asia, will hasten still more the replacement of the native by foreign 

 stock. 



7. Agricultural Distribution of Immigrants will not solve the 

 Immigration Problem. — But few of those who are now urging the 

 necessity of relieving the city slum burden by distributing the slum 

 population realize that such distribution will not, and can not, of 

 itself, lead to any relief, as long as the tide of new immigration flows 

 on unchecked. As Professor John E. Commons, one of the leading 

 authorities on immigration in the United States, has recently said:* 



To relieve the pressure in the cities without restricting the number ad- 

 mitted only opens the way for a still larger immigration; for, strangely 

 enough, emigration has not relieved the pressure of population in Europe. In 

 no period of their history, with the exception of Ireland, have the populations 

 of Europe increased at a greater rate than during the last half century of 

 migration to America. As a relief for current immigration, agricultural dis- 

 tribution is not promising. 



It needs but little thought to convince any one that were it not 

 for the continued influx of hundreds of thousands of ignorant and 

 poverty-stricken aliens each year, there would, in few years, re- 

 main no such serious problem of Jewish charity, or of Italian 

 charity, or of any other charity in our country as at present. It 

 is a fact, so obvious as to need no argument in support of it, that 

 the more we try to reduce the pressure of competition among the alien 

 immigrants in our congested city slums, the more we shall encourage 

 other aliens, as ignorant and as poor, to come over and take the places 

 thus vacated. Distribution and a reduction in the numbers of our 

 immigrants: both of these remedies are needed. Private charitable 

 agencies are not likely to have money enough to carry out any scheme 

 of distribution on a large scale ; that will be attended to by the capital- 

 istic interests which want the cheapest labor obtainable. Charitable 

 societies and individuals should do their best to see that this distri- 



* The Chautauquan, May, 1904, 224. 



