“Hundreds of thousands of penniless immigrants arriving in our ports every year! No wonder that in the American labor market competition grows fiercer and fiercer!” Here we have two expressions of opinion that may be heard every day, and that give diametrically opposite views of one of the most familiar and important facts of the day. Which of the two is correct? Is the arrival of a foreigner, whose sole capital is his ability to labor, a benefit or an injury to the country? It is surely time that the question should be definitely decided in the popular mind. The annual influx of about half a million foreigners cannot but have a tremendous effect upon the industrial, social and political development of the country. If its effect is beneficial, then the influx should be encouraged and even stimulated; if injurious, it should be regulated and restricted. The question is one for political economists and statesmen. Politicians of the ordinary sort will no doubt prefer to let it severely alone. It was indeed raised as a political issue by the defunct Knownothing party, but the shape in which it was presented, and the answer that it met, belong to a past generation. We have to deal with the subject anew, and at a more advanced point in our national history. Our condition, our needs, and our dangers are widely different from those of our predecessors, and changed circumstances may require altered policies. Few will question the truth of the axiom that the great need of a new country is industrious immigrants. In the youth of the American commonwealth, its pioneers found themselves possessed of a vast continent of almost boundless natural resources, upon whose eastern edge a handful of scanty population was scattered. Had immigration ceased at the beginning of the present century, the development of those resources would have been incalculably retarded. This would be today a comparatively small, weak and indigent nation—more closely resembling, perhaps, the Canada of today than the United States of today. So much for the past. Now for the future. Do not common sense and experience show that communities, like individuals, must have their birth, their adolescence, and their maturity? And must there not come a time in their development when accessions to their numbers are rather a burden than an aid? We have all heard of over populated countries, and it is not necessary to be a follower of Malthus to recognize that while population tends to multiply in an ever increasing ratio, there must always be a limit to the means of subsistence. That we are within measurable distance of such a limit we do not maintain; that we are advancing toward it cannot be denied.