14 Transactions of the Canadian Institute. [vol. x 



ask where the illiterates do go, I find they go to the cities. They go to 

 the slum portion of the cities very largely." No doubt one reason why 

 the Jew will not stay in the country is, that his physique does not fit him 

 for hard manual labour. This was true also of the immigrants from 

 Ireland during and after the "hungry forties". The clothing trade is 

 the special industrial province of the Jew. Here his d^it fingers, and 

 perhaps his artistic sense, give him an advantage which is not neutralised 

 by his deficiencies of bone and sinew. The connection between the tariff 

 and the number of foreign-born Jews in the cities is therefore especially 

 direct. Had not the clothing trade been so highly protected, American 

 foodstuffs would have paid for English clothing. The tariff diverted 

 employment from agriculture to the clothing industry, and the Jews 

 seized on this occupation. The chance thus opened to the first comers 

 enabled them to prepay the passages of relatives and friends in great 

 number, who likewise made this their principal occupation, and so the 

 rate of immigration gathered momentum with the flight of time, labour 

 in the clothing industry became too plentiful, and New York began to 

 rival London in the horrors of its sweating system. We cannot now see 

 the end of this development. No doubt the imposition of a minimum 

 wage in the sweatshops, by depriving certain workers of all hope of 

 employment, would bring this class of immigration suddenly to an end; 

 but it is to be hoped that measures may be devised, which will be less 

 cruel to the poorest of all our industrial workers. 



Direct and indirect, the influence of Republican Protection is to 

 be seen in the tremendous preponderance of Latin, Slavonic, Jewish 

 and Magyar immigration at the present day. Even now we are not in 

 a position to deny that without the tariff the preponderance would 

 have existed. But, taken together, the Census Reports, the Report of 

 the Massachusetts Bureau of Labour, and the experience of the Hebrew 

 Aid Society drive us irresistibly to the conclusion that owing to that 

 tariff, this preponderance is greater than it need have been. 



One further effect of this remains to be mentioned. It is not neces- 

 sary here to repeat the proof of the late General Francis A. Walker,* 

 that immigration into a young country, by threatening the standard of 

 life of the native population, lessens the birth-rate among these natives, 

 and so leads in the end, not to an addition of foreign people to the total 

 of inhabitants, but to a substitution of these foreigners for the native 

 element which would have been horn had this immigration not occurred. 

 The statistical work of the late Elkanah Watson, on the probable increase 

 of the American population (which is quoted and discussed by General 

 Walker in "The Forum", Vol. ii.) gives some colour to the supposition 



*Walker, " Discussions in Economics and Statistics", Vol. ii., pp. 417-455. 



