And yet, low as our lowest classes have been ground, they are not low enough. Thousands of agents of steamship companies are gathering the outcasts from the sewers of Europe and shipping them here. The rate of immigration into this country was three hundred and eleven thousand in 1899, four hundred and eighty-seven thousand in 1901, six hundred and forty-eight thousand in 1902, eight hundred and fifty-seven thousand in 1903, and over a million in 1905—more than one-half of the last shipments being from Hungary, Russia, and southern Italy. All this, you must understand, is managed by the “System” which rules in our centres of industry. “In that unhappy anthracite country,” writes Mr. John Graham Brooks, a person of authority, “the employers will tell you openly, and with conscious bravado, that they must get cheaper and cheaper labour to keep wages down, else they could make no money.” And it was recently estimated by George W. Morgan, State Superintendent of Elections in New York, that in one past year over six hundred thousand dollars profit was made by selling false naturalisation papers. The Federal authorities who had been investigating the frauds believed that over one hundred thousand sets of such papers had been sold, and that thirty thousand of these had been issued in New York City. Fully thirty per cent. of the Italian citizens in the southern district of New York were estimated to hold false papers. Cheaper and cheaper labour! Women’s labour and children’s labour! Over one million of women are at present working in factories alone in this country; and one million and three-quarters of children between ten and fifteen years of age are engaged in gainful occupations. In the cotton factories of the South, while the number of men employed increased seventy-nine per cent. in the past ten years, the number of women increased one hundred and fifty-eight per cent. and the number of children under sixteen increased two hundred and seventy per cent. The number employed in Alabama alone was estimated by the Committee on Child Labour to be fifty thousand, with thirty-four per cent. of them under twelve years, and ten per cent. under _ten_ years. These children work twelve hours a day, and the oldest get fifty cents and the youngest get nine cents. Here are the descriptions of observers: “A little boy of six years has been working 12 hours a day, from 6:20 A. M. to 6:20 P. M. (40 minutes off at noon), for 15 cents per day. “Three boys aged respectively 9, 8, and 7 years. The boy aged 9 has been working two years, the boy aged 8 has been working three years; the boy aged 7 years has been working two years. These little fellows work 13 hours a day, from 5:20 A. M. to 6:30 P. M., with twenty minutes for dinner. In ‘rush’ periods their mill works until 9:30 and 10 P. M. They were refused a holiday for Thanksgiving and they obtained Christmas Day only by working till 7 P. M. in order to make up the time.”