Photograph by A. F. Sherman 



IMMIGRANTS IN RAILWAY WAITING-ROOM : ELLIS ISLAND 



Having passed muster with the doctor and the inspector at the nation's gate, it has 

 swung open to these new arrivals, and now they are in free America, ready to' journey 

 unhindered to their respective destinations. 



peace whose economic opportunities will 

 have the same effect ? 



One searches the pages of history in 

 vain for a satisfactory answer. The his- 

 tory of past wars throws no certain light 

 upon it. After our own Civil War, the 

 South, burdened with debts, wanted a 

 million things. But empty pocketbooks 

 and poor credit form a combination that 

 has little buying power. And so the 

 South, unable to solve its economic diffi- 

 culties at once, had to sit by and see thou- 

 sands of its people go into the North and 

 West to start over again. The end of 

 the Russo-Japanese W T ar brought great 

 hordes of Russians to our shores, eco- 

 nomic necessity impelling them to leave 

 their homelands. 



The Franco - Prussian War, on the 

 other hand, sent only a normal number 

 of French people to America as one of 

 its aftermaths, and all the people who left 

 Europe following the Napoleonic wars 

 were fewer in number than those coming 



here in a single three-months' period of 

 our normal immigration history. 



There are those who say that the rea- 

 son the South could not rebuild after the 

 Civil War was because it did not get the 

 support of the Federal Government — a 

 support which the governments of Eu- 

 rope will give their people. They point 

 out that none of the warring nations, 

 however much they may owe, have bor- 

 rowed as near to the margin of their 

 credit as many Latin-American countries, 

 and that people who would not buy their 

 war bonds will take their peace obliga- 

 tions readily. They point to the experi- 

 ence of Baltimore and San Francisco to 

 show how new prosperity and fresh re- 

 sources can arise out of the ashes of 

 calamity. 



SIX PANAMA CANALS A YEAR INTEREST 

 CHARGE 



But the difference between an isolated 

 city and practically a whole continent is 

 too great for such an analogy to be sig- 



107 



