PERILS. — IMMIGRATION. 45 



Our argument is concerned not with all of them, but 

 0)ily ivith those tvhich 2^ecidiarlfj threaten the West. 



America, as the land of promise to all the world, 

 is the destination of the most remarkable migration 

 of which we have any record. During the last ten 

 years we have suffered a peaceful invasion by an army 

 more than four times as vast as the estimated number 

 of Goths and Vandals that swept over Southern Europe 

 and overwhelmed Rome. During the past hundred years 

 fifteen million foreigners have made their homes in the 

 United States, and three-quarters of them have come 

 since 1850, while 5,248,000 have arrived since 1880. A 

 study of the causes of this great world movement indi- 

 cates that perhaps as yet we have seen only beginnings. 

 These controlling causes are threefold. 1. The attract- 

 ing influences of the United States. 2. The expellent 

 influences of the Old World. 3. Facilities for travel. 



1. The attracting influences of the United States. We 

 have already seen that for every one inhabitant in 1880 

 the land is capable of sustaining twenty. This largeness 

 of room and opportunity constitutes an urgent invitation 

 to the crowded peoples of Europe. The prospect of pro- 

 prietorship in the soil is a powerful attraction to the 

 European peasant. In England only one person in 

 twenty is an owner of land ; in Scotland, one in twenty- 

 fiv e ; in Ireland, one in seventy -nine, and the great ma- 

 jority of land-holders in Great Britain own less than one 

 acre each. More than three-fifths of the United King- 

 dom is in the hands of the landlords, who own, each 

 one, a thousand acres or more.^ One man rides in a 

 straight line a hundred miles on his own estate. An- 

 other owns a county extending across Scotland. A 

 gentleman in Scotland a few years since, appropriated 

 three hundred square miles of land, extending from sea 

 to sea, to a deer forest, evicting many families to make 

 room for the deer. " Scotland official figures show that 

 one-third of the families live in a single room, and more 



1 Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol, VIII. p. 223. 



