Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 20. December, 1877Various
Science
Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 20. December, 1877
Various
Literature, Modern -- 19th century -- Periodicals; Science -- Periodicals
Among the long and varied list of reasons assigned for the financial
reverses of the past five years, we do not recollect to have discovered the
falling off of European immigration. This would appear one of the most
obvious and controlling of them all. About a million less have been added
from abroad to the population of the Union within that time than the
figures of a like number of years immediately preceding caused to be
expected. If, according to the prevailing estimate, each individual thus
acquired is worth a thousand dollars to the country, its aggregate loss in
this way far exceeds the sum sunk in superfluous railways, to which
extravagance almost exclusively the custom is to ascribe the revulsion.
Eight hundred or a thousand millions of money which the country had under
its hands as it were, reckoned among its available assets and used in
gauging the immediate future of its industry, suddenly vanished. The direct
abstraction from its resources of so large an item could not fail to be
seriously felt. It amounts to the reduction of an average State to a desert
condition--to the loss of twice as many pairs of stout hands as were
sacrificed in the four years of civil war. The homes marked out for them
are desolate, the waste places they would have made to bloom given to the
weeds, the industries which craved them paralyzed, and the wealth they were
to create cancelled.
Such is undoubtedly the economic aspect of this check to the movement of
human freight upon the Atlantic. Viewed from the politico-social side, its
effects will not be deemed so unfortunate even by those whose confidence in
the assimilative power of our institutions is most unqualified. A million
and a half or two millions of matriculates at the great modern political
school is quite a liberal allowance for one decade. Twice the number might
press heavily on the provision made for adequate tuition. The results of
the course upon those who have already graduated, born at home or abroad,
are not at all too flattering. In the West, where our European guests most
do congregate, notions are discoverable of a very helter-skelter
description upon divorce, the "rights of labor," and religion in the public
schools--notions which, whether sound or the reverse, clearly need settling
rather than additional disturbance. The case is similar in cities and
densely-peopled districts at the East, where the same element has especial
weight. At the same time, it is difficult to say how far this association
of facts is accidental or necessary and significant. The proportion of
crotchety agitators among the population of foreign birth we believe to be
actually less than among the natives. Certainly, our most mischievous
"ringmasters" in partisan politics have been Americans. Immigrants do not
usually bring that class of men with them. As to the masses, it can rarely
be said that the European peasant, as he reaches our shores, is calculated
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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