The unlimited pouring in of destitute and degraded foreigners tends both directly and indirectly to increase our national burden of pauperism, vice, and crime. With regard to the first part of this statement it is often objected that but few of these foreign immigrants come upon the rates, and that our workhouses and penitentiaries show comparatively faint signs of their presence. This is a half-truth, and like all half-truths it conceals a most dangerous fallacy. _Nulla falsa doctrina est, quae non permisceat aliquid veritatis._ On the surface I admit the plausibility of the objection. In Leeds, for instance, where the foreign colony has reached abnormal proportions, the total number of Jews chargeable to the common fund of the Leeds Union, at the time when particulars were furnished to the Board of Trade in the early part of this year (1891), was only 62. The numerous Jewish and Foreign Benevolent Societies and Charitable Institutions are far too careful to allow their people to come upon the rates more than they can possibly help. But that the whole tendency of this destitute foreign immigration is to force those of our English working-classes, who are in any degree affected by it, into pauperism or something worse, cannot for one moment be denied by those who have any practical knowledge of the poor in the crowded centres of population to which these undesirable foreigners flock. In proof of this assertion, I may quote the opinion of the Mile End Board of Guardians, who believed that this destitute foreign immigration had "a deteriorating effect upon the moral, financial, and social conditions of the people." The Whitechapel Guardians of the poor also deplore the substitution of the foreign for the English population. The result, they say, is the lowering of the general condition of the people. The Hackney Board of Guardians also, after an exhaustive inquiry, arrived at the opinion that the unchecked immigration of destitute foreigners was a serious social danger, reducing wages to a "starvation point." They supported their decision by a series of practical and convincing arguments which only lack of space prevents my quoting in full.[22]