The dramatic unionization of the garment industries in our large cities has misled the public as to the actual effect of recent immigration upon trade-unions. The fact is that the immigrants from the backward parts of Europe tend to weaken, if not to shatter, labor organizations in the fields they enter. They arrive needy and eager to get any work at almost any pay. Having had no industrial experience in the old country, they lack the trade-union idea. Without our speech, and often illiterate, they are very hard to reach and to bring into line. So far as they are transients, who are not staking their future on the industry, they are loath to pay union dues and to run the risk of having to strike. It is true that the labor organizer evangelizes the alien workers with his union gospel; but by the time one batch has been welded into a fighting force, another batch is on his hands. His work, like Penelope's web, is raveled out about as fast as it is woven. No wonder that in the cotton industry unionism has been wrecked, while, of the iron miners, less than two per cent. belong to unions. In 1901 the United States Steel Corporation's constituent companies signed agreements with two-thirds of their 125,000 workmen, among whom the English-speaking held a dominant place. Ten years later the company signed not a single agreement with its beaten mass of Slav-Latins. There was no union with which to sign. The organizing, organizable Americans had been deleted from the works. No wonder that organized labor demands restriction of immigration. While the inrush continues, the lines of labor will be weak, forming, breaking, and reforming in the face of the intrenchments of capital. IMMIGRANTS AND WAGES During the last fifteen years the flood of gold has brought in a spring-tide of prices. Since 1896 the retail cost to Americans of their fifteen principal articles of food has risen seventy per cent. Wages should have risen in like degree if the workman is to retain his old standard, to say nothing of keeping his place in a social procession which is continually mounting to higher economic levels. We know that by 1907 wages had risen twenty-eight per cent., while retail prices were rising twenty-six per cent. Evidently the working man was falling behind in the social procession. In the soft-coal field of Pennsylvania, where the Slav dominates, the coal-worker receives forty-two cents a day less than the coal-worker in the mines of the Middle West and Southwest, where he does not dominate. In meat-packing, iron and steel, cotton manufacture, and other foreignized industries the inertia of wages has been very marked. The presence of the immigrant has prevented a wage advance which otherwise must have occurred. [Illustration: "Shack" of a Polish Iron Miner, Hibbing, Minn.] [Illustration: Cabin of an Austrian Iron Miner, Virginia, Minn.] What a college man saw in a copper-mine in the Southwest gives in a nutshell the logic of low wages.