IMMIGRATION TO THE UNITED STATES 85 



After the Civil War between the North and South our coun- 

 try began to expand rapidly, to grow great and to exploit 

 every form of industry and trade known to man and to make 

 use of the thousands of new inventions which the eager minds 

 of this and other countries had devised. The original Eng- 

 lish-speaking American stock went further afield and began to 

 settle and occupy the great West which lay between the Middle 

 States and the Pacific Ocean. To undertake the necessary 

 hard work and pioneer labor, fresh importations and immigra- 

 tion from Europe were demanded. The immigration from the 

 English-speaking races and from Teutonic lands was beginning 

 to slacken and in some cases had almost ceased. The immi- 

 grants of those races already here had entered upon the second 

 stage, that of property owners and the employers of labor 

 themselves, whilst the demand for labor in America — labor 

 of the cheapest and commonest sort, requiring brawn, muscle 

 and endurance — was ever increasing. New projects for the 

 development of the United States and its varied industries 

 were constantly evolved and strong and stout men were re- 

 quired to realize them. Then it was that the Eastern and 

 Southern parts of Europe awoke to the fact that America 

 needed strong muscles and willing arms. 



In the '8o's the movement towards America set in strongly 

 from Austria, with its varied races, and from Italy, with its 

 industrious and facile workmen. It has been a steadily in- 

 creasing stream ever since, the numbers year by year mounting 

 higher and higher. To it have been added new races, those of 

 Turkey and the Balkans and of Asia Minor and Egypt. Fur- 

 ther Asia (the extreme Orient of China, Japan, Siam and 

 allied races) has contributed but little, owing to our exclusion 

 laws. Yet even the aggregate of their numbers throughout 

 the United States is large. Russia, the great consolidated em- 

 pire of Eastern Europe and Northern Asia, has sent us her 

 immigrants, consisting mostly of non-Russian peoples, Jews, 

 Poles, Lithuanians, Finns and other subject peoples. Her 

 own race, the Russians of Slavic blood, she encourages to 

 emigrate to Siberia, which she is settling with a rapidity greater 

 than we displayed in our Western States. 



Thus, the older class of immigration has gradually passed 

 away. The peoples from the east and south of Europe and 

 from Asia and Africa bordering on the Mediterranean, consti- 



