State bureaus of labor appeared in many States as the result of the general agitation. An eight-hour law, for federal employees, had been gained in 1868, while in 1884 a Commissioner of Labor was created in the Department of the Interior. Arthur was urged to give the post to Powderly, but selected instead an economist less actively identified with the propaganda, Carroll D. Wright, under whose direction the Bureau grew steadily in importance. Its reports became quarries for statistical information on the labor problem, and its success justified its incorporation in the new Department of Commerce and Labor in 1903. The "Army of the Discontented," as Powderly called the workers, demanded education and protective laws, and turned their attention to competition about 1882. The cutting of wages by peasant laborers, newly arrived in America, was a grievance as soon as labor became class-conscious. Opposition to this became virulent in the Far West, where the foreigner was also a Mongolian. The Chinese of the Pacific Slope, more frugal and industrious than Americans, were harried in the early eighties, and violence was done them in many quarters. Garfield had been weakened in 1880 by a forged letter seeming to show that he favored the introduction of more Chinese. So numerous were the persecutors that Congress responded to the demand for a Chinese Exclusion Bill, in spite of the Treaty of 1880, which guaranteed fair treatment. Arthur vetoed the first bill, but accepted a second, less stringent in its terms. After this victory, the labor forces turned upon immigration in general. No idea had been fixed more firmly in the American mind than that the oppressed of Europe were here to find opportunity. Immigrants had always been welcomed and assimilated, while Congress had, in 1864, organized a bureau to encourage and safeguard immigration. The influx always increased in prosperous, and declined in adverse, years. After 1878 the annual number broke all records. Western railway corporations were inviting immigrants to use their lands, manufacturers called them to the mills, and the total rose from 177,000 in 1879 to 788,000 in 1882. This latter year was the greatest of the century, its newcomers attracting the attention of the press, of the city charities who felt their growing responsibilities, and of the unions who felt their competition. Nearly all the immigrants were producers, a high percentage being able-bodied young men and women. The greatest number came from Great Britain, among whom the Irish settled in the Eastern cities. Next were the Germans, who moved toward Chicago or St. Louis, while the Scandinavians filled up the wheat-lands of the Northwest.