The Commissioner of Immigration at New York stated one year that 200,000 of the one million immigrants of that year were a real injury to the best interests of the country. Since the steamship company must be at the expense of returning an immigrant who is sent back, they make doubtful cases give a bond repaying them the return fare if the immigrant fails to slip by the “man at the gate.” Of course the only interest the company has is to get the immigrant’s money. One steamship line anxious to make money brought over on one ship three hundred and eighty diseased peasants that Ellis Island promptly sent back. Among those peasants were many people of Montenegro. The Montenegrins are great soldiers. Tennyson wrote of them as “Warriors beating back the swarm Of Turkish Islam for five hundred years.” For five hundred years they have stood as a bulwark between the Turk and Europe. When they reached the home port, they stormed the offices of the steamship company, demanding the return of their fare, and after one look at their determined faces the clerks promptly locked themselves in and telephoned the authorities for help. Some are induced to part with all they own, selling their little business and then, because of ill health or other difficulties that the agent might easily have known, are turned back broken-hearted and poverty-stricken to the village whence they came. Sometimes they are even sent to ports entirely different from those to which they had planned to go. This, of course, is all wrong. _The Employer._ The reason back of the coming of many of these people is the employer, the man who manages the railways, the mines, or large contracts. He works through the padrones, and the Italian banks that “direct two-thirds of the stream of Italian immigration.” You may be surprised to know that the news of a big railroad contract reaches Italy as soon as we hear it. If we are to build subways or barge canals, or carry an underground river into New York, or let great railroad contracts, or make a garden of the desert with colossal irrigation reservoirs and canals, the message flies under the ocean to far-away Italy and there is spread through a thousand villages. The employer is constantly looking for cheaper labor. Around his mine or factory are American homes, practising the “American standard of living.” This is a valuable term much in use and since it will occur again in this book we stop here to explain what it means. The American standard of living simply means the way most Americans live. Do you know that we live better than any other people in the world?