How keenly alive American statesmen are to the evils which result from unrestricted immigration, is shown by a perusal of the Acts which have been passed upon the subject. The Acts, other than those regulating the immigration of Chinese labourers, are three in number, viz.:--The Act to regulate immigration approved by Congress in 1882, the Contract Labour Law of 1885, and the recent Act to amend all previous laws, which was approved by Congress on the 3rd of March of this year, and which came into force on the 1st of April last.[29] I do not propose to dwell upon the provisions of those Acts in detail; they are given in full elsewhere;[30] but section 1 of the new Act, which specifies the class of aliens henceforth to be excluded from the United States, deserves to be quoted in full:--"All idiots, insane persons; paupers, or persons likely to become a public charge; persons suffering from a loathsome or a dangerous contagious disease; persons who have been convicted of felony or other infamous crime or misdemeanour involving moral turpitude, polygamists, and also any persons whose ticket or passage is paid for with the money of another, or who is assisted by others to come." The right of asylum to political and religious refugees is maintained intact by the insertion of a special proviso. The working of the Act is very simple. The immigrants are stopped at the port of arrival and inspected, and the steamship companies are compelled to take back at their own expense all those who are refused admission; and heavy penalties of fine and imprisonment are dealt out to those who attempt to break or to evade the law. This course of action, though it may seem to press hardly in individual cases, has been found to have an excellent deterrent effect, for as soon as steamship companies know that they bring over such passengers at their own risk, they refuse to bring them at all, and the evil to a great extent is nipped in the bud. Now, if such measures of self-defence have become thus early in her history imperative with a young country like America, with a habitable area of _more than 3,000,000 square miles_, and a population of not more than 65,000,000, what are we to think of an old country like England, with an area of _a little over 32,000,000 acres_, and a population, according to the census of 1881, of near 25,000,000 souls--and probably of over 30,000,000 now--compelled to spend annually some £7,000,000 on the relief or support of her own three-quarters of a million of paupers--leaving her ports, more especially the port of London, free for the entrance of a huge foreign and degraded population, from every country in Europe, which statistics demonstrate to be largely on the increase?