One point remains to be noted. It has been urged that these immigrant aliens do not enter upon native trades, but introduce new industries of their own. If that were really the case, such a contention would undoubtedly have much weight. The Huguenots established new industries of silk, glass, and paper; the Flemings introduced the finer class of weaving into England; in both of these cases the alien influx was beneficial. But it cannot be seriously maintained that these low-class Jewish immigrants have stimulated or created new wants. They have created no new trade; they have debased old ones. I admit that they almost monopolize the cheap clothing trade, but even here they have created no new _kind_ of industry. The power of the German, Russian, or Polish Jew, accustomed to a lower standard of life, to undersell the English worker in the English labour market must be admitted by all, though the exact importance of it is, I know, a disputed point. The industrial degradation of the "sweated" workers arises from the fact that they are working surrounded by a "pool of unemployed," or superfluous supply of labour. So long as this standing pool remains, and so long as it is ever being augmented by the endless influx of cheap, destitute foreign labour, so long it is difficult to see how the wages of the low unskilled workers can be materially raised. Let the pool be gradually drawn off, and wages will rise, since the combined action of the workers will no longer be able to be defeated by the eagerness of the foreigner to take their work and wages. But the pool can never be drawn off until the stream which so largely recruits it is cut off at its source. If once this foreign influx is stopped, it will decrease by the natural process of evaporation. Let us take a national view. The true standard of a nation's prosperity is to be found in the prosperity of its working-classes. The higher the rate of wages the better is the condition of the working-classes; the cheaper the labour of a country, the lower the condition of the people therein. One of the surest signs of the real rise of a nation is the elevation of the masses in their wages, their habits, their homes, their scale of living, and their condition generally. Anything which tends to reduce the price of labour tends also to reduce the labourer's standard of comfort and prosperity, and there can be no manner of doubt that this continuous influx of destitute foreigners does tend both directly and indirectly to reduce the profits of the wage-earning classes. Wages follow certain inexorable laws of supply and demand. If the supply of human labour exceeds the market demand, then the men will be beaten down; and how can the supply do otherwise than exceed the demand, when the market is being continually flooded by the influx of the cheapest kind of foreign labour?