Workingmen dream of an industrialism which shall be the handmaid of a commerce ministering to an increased power of consumption among the producers of the world, binding them together in a genuine internationalism. Existing commerce has long ago reached its international stage, but it has been the result of business aggression and constantly appeals for military defense and for the forcing of new markets. In so far as commerce has rested upon the successful capture of the resources of the workers, it has been a relic of the mediaeval baron issuing forth to seize the merchants’ boats as they passed his castle on the Rhine. It has logically lent itself to warfare, and is, indeed, the modern representative of conquest. As its prototype rested upon slavery and vassalage, so this commerce is founded upon a contempt for the worker and believes that he can live on low wages. It assumes that his legitimate wants are the animal ones comprising merely food and shelter and the cost of replacement. The industrialism of which this commerce is a part, exhibits this same contemptuous attitude, but it is more easily extended to immigrants than to any other sort of workmen because they seem further away from a common standard of life. This attitude toward the immigrant simply illustrates once more that it is around the deeply significant idea of the standard of life that our industrial problems of to-day centre. The desire for a higher standard of living in reality forms the base of all the forward movements of the working class. “The significance of the standard of life lies not so much in the fact that for each of us it is different, as that for all of us it is progressive,”[8] constantly invading new realms. To imagine that for immigrants it is merely a question of tin cups and plates stored in a bunk _versus_ a white cloth and a cottage table, and that all goes well if sewing-machines and cottage-organs reach the first generation of immigrants, and fashionable dressmakers and pianos the second, is of course a most untutored interpretation. Until the standard of life is apprehended in its real significance and made the crux of the immigrant situation, as recent economists are making the power of consumption the test of a nation’s prosperity, we shall continue to ignore the most obvious and natural basis for understanding and mutual citizenship.