39 o POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



plain of " the ruinous drain of the most useful part of the population 

 of the United Kingdom," and that universal panacea for all ills, 

 social and otherwise — parliamentary action — was demanded. The 

 skilled craftsman upon his arrival found positions of responsibil- 

 ity awaiting him; the native inhabitants did not have any con- 

 siderable knowledge of the mechanical arts, and it therefore de- 

 volved upon the foreigner to take the position which the American 

 was incapable of filling. The school teachers were largely recruited 

 from the ranks of the alien; early in the century all the booksellers 

 but two in Philadelphia were foreigners, and of the five newspapers 

 in that city two were owned by Englishmen and two by Irishmen. 

 With these desirable immigrants, however, began to come another 

 class, poor and ignorant, having neither trade nor money; they became 

 stranded in the seaboard towns, being without the means to proceed 

 farther; some became laborers, others earned a precarious livelihood 

 by doing a little work at intervals, but many finally became depend- 

 ent upon public charity. Then it was that the delinquent classes, 

 paupers, and petty criminals, arose and multiplied rapidly for the 

 first time in the history of the country. 



This evil might have then been almost eliminated from the popu- 

 lation, or at least materially abated, but unfortunately the great city 

 of Philadelphia at that time, when it most demanded prompt sup- 

 pression, fostered it by well-meant but indiscriminate charity, which 

 of course resulted in the rapid growth of a dependent and semi- 

 criminal class. It is almost needless to point out that social evils 

 may spread as rapidly as diseases of the flesh, and that the moral con- 

 tagion is much more difficult to eradicate than the physical; and it 

 will therefore occasion no surprise to find that pauperism and crime 

 communicated themselves to the native element. Yet in no com- 

 munity exhibiting the complex organization that did this country 

 at the beginning of the nineteenth century would an escape from this 

 evil have been possible; the hour of its arrival might have been 

 somewhat postponed, but the very fact of the rapid spread of the 

 contagion is an indication of the unhealthful condition of the social 

 fabric; of this, too, we have further evidence in the incipient rebel- 

 lions which began almost immediately after the Revolution was over, 

 and manifested a restlessness and impatience, largely on the part of 

 the native American element, and a dissatisfaction with constituted 

 authority. 



Here a distinction is to be drawn between the development of the 

 North and the South, and, as the latter presents few complex fea- 

 tures and can not occupy much of the space of this article, it may 

 as well be dealt with here. Of the original colonies, those south of 

 the thirty-seventh parallel seem to have never attracted many aliens. 



