Despite the world-wide knowledge of this lack of remunerative employment in the United States, the ranks of the unemployed and dissatisfied there were constantly recruited by immigrants from the most dangerous classes of Europe. The vigorous action which had been taken in 1886 and 1887 by the Governments of Germany, Russia, and Austria, looking to the extirpation in their dominions of socialism, nihilism, and their kindred poisons, and the refusal of Switzerland, England, and France to afford asylum to the expelled fanatics, had forced them to take refuge in America. One or two of the wisest and bravest among the statesmen of the land raised their voices against receiving and harboring these men. But the public had few statesmen in its service. Mere politicians and demagogues were in greater popular favor than statesmen who despised the cheap tricks and unworthy flattery which won the common ear. Public men generally had come to think more of majorities than of principles; to labor for their own election to office rather than for the good of the country. The newspapers were commonly partisan and devoted to purely partisan ends,--the chief of which was, naturally, partisan success. None dared to do or say anything which might offend and alienate voters; and so every steamship from Europe continued to bring to the Atlantic ports of the country full steerage-loads of men who were not thought fit to live under the Governments of Europe, but who, almost on their landing, became citizens and voters in the Republic. Added to these were the tens of thousands of Irishmen whom the stringent measures of Parliament, adopted after the dynamite explosions of 1884 and 1885, had driven from their native island. Over half a million able-bodied men, without mention of women or children, expelled outlaws of Europe, landed at New York, Boston, and Philadelphia in the two years of 1885 and 1886. They swelled the ranks of workmen without work, and helped reduce by competition and division the already scanty wages of labor. Every one of them was a poisonous ferment dropped into the already over-stimulated mass of popular discontent and agitation. They invariably united with the existing centres of socialism and Fenianism, making these organizations, even without other converts, tenfold more dangerous than they had ever been before. II. THE MORAL INTERREGNUM.