In my judgment the smallest part of the duty to be discharged in successfully handling alien immigrants with a view to the protection of the people and institutions of this country is that part now provided for by law. Its importance, though undeniable, is relatively of secondary moment. It cannot, for example, compare in practical value with, nor can it take the place of, measures to ensure the distribution of the many thousands who come in ignorance of the industrial needs and opportunities of this country, and, by a more potent law than that of supply and demand, which speaks to them here in an unknown tongue, colonizes alien communities in our great cities. Such colonies are a menace to the physical, social, moral, and political security of the country. They are hotbeds for the propagation and growth of those false ideas of political and personal freedom whose germs have been vitalized by ages of oppression under unequal and partial laws, which find their first concrete expression in resistance to constituted authority, even occasionally in the assassination of the lawful agents of that authority. They are the breeding-grounds also of moral depravity; the centres of propagation of physical disease. Above all, they are the congested places in the industrial body which check the free circulation of labor to those parts where it is most needed and where it can be most benefited. Do away with them, and the greatest peril of immigration will be removed. Removed from the sweat-shops and slums of the great cities, and given the opportunity to acquire a home, every alien, however radical his theories of government and individual right may have been, will become a conservative—a supporter in theory and practice of those institutions under whose benign protection he has acquired and can defend his household goods. Suitable legislation is therefore strongly urged to establish agencies by means of which, either with or without the co-operation of the States, aliens shall be made acquainted with the resources of the country at large, the industrial needs of the various sections in both skilled and unskilled labor, the cost of living, the wages paid, the price and capabilities of the lands, the character of the climates, the duration of the seasons,—in short, all of that information furnished by some of the great railway lines through whose efforts the territory tributary thereto has been transformed from a wilderness within a few years to the abiding-place of a happy and prosperous population.