[84]The committee took a very important step in recommending a permanent percentage law and thus recognizing the principle that the United States should never keep its doors wide open. Second, the percentage is based on the census of 1890 instead of the census of 1910, as in the present law. The new measure thus aims to change the character of our future immigration by cutting down the number of aliens who can come from southern and eastern Europe. In other words, it is recognized that, on the whole, northern and western Europe furnish the best material for citizenship. The total immigration, therefore, was reduced from 357,000 to 164,667 and the emigrants have to be deducted from this to ascertain the actual annual increase. The Italian quota was reduced from 42,000 to 3,845; the Russian from 24,000 to 2,200; the Polish from 30,000 to 6,000. On the other hand, the German quota was reduced only from 67,000 to 51,000; the Norwegian from 12,000 to 6,400; the British and Irish from 77,000 to 62,500. The bill carried out radically the intentions of its sponsors, to cut down the flood of immigration and to discriminate against the racial and religious groups which they consider inferior because they appear externally to be different. It is a group reaction of the same order and motivation as the Ku Klux Klan. 6. A concurrent phenomenon, arising from the same group mind but essentially different in manifestation, is the suppression of civil liberties which began during the war and continued afterward, an expression of the same impulse toward compulsory like-mindedness, but taking its criterion from the economic rather than the cultural, religious or racial aspects of the differing groups. As Father Ryan put it: [85]These deplorable phenomena are three-fourths due to war legislation and surviving war hysteria and one-fourth due to industrial factors.... By means of clever, unscrupulous and wholesale propaganda, nine-tenths of the American people were led to believe that the steel strike of 1919 was revolutionary, bolshevistic, and aimed immediately at the overthrow of the government. As a matter of fact, there was no more bolshevism in that contest than in any one of a dozen important disputes that have occurred in the last ten years. Attorney General Palmer asserted that there was an organized attempt to overthrow the government of the United States sufficiently widespread to merit the attention of Congress. As a matter of fact, there was no such danger.