Free land, coupled with high individual efficiency, has made this country a low-pressure area. It ought to remain such, because individualistic democracy forbids a blind animal-like increase of numbers. By causing the population to accommodate itself to opportunities, our democracy solves the Sphinx's riddle and opens a bright prospect of continuous social progress. But of late that prospect has been clouded. The streaming in from the backward lands is sensibly converting this country from a low-pressure area into a high-pressure area. It is nearly a generation since the stress, registered in the labor-market, caused the British working-man to fight shy of America. It is twenty years since it reached the point at which the German working-man, already on the up-grade at home, ceased to be drawn to America. As the saturation of our labor-market by cheaper and ever cheaper human beings raises the pressure-gage, we fail to attract as of yore such peoples as the North Italians and the Magyars. [Illustration: Roumanian Shepherds in Native Costume, Ellis Island] In 1898 few came to us from east of Hungary. Now we are receiving them from Asiatic Turkey, Circassia, Syria, and Arabia. An immigration has started up from Persia, and conditions are ripe for a heavy influx from western Asia. These remote regions, which have had only twilight from Europe's forenoon, are high-pressure areas. Their peoples are too many in relation to the opportunities they know how to use. Until education, democratic ideas, and the elevation of women restrict their increase, or machine industry widens their opportunities, these regions will continue to produce a surplus of people, which the enterprising avarice of steamship companies will make ever more mobile and more threatening to the wage-earners of an advanced country. Only lately comes the announcement that one of the trans-Atlantic lines is about to run its steamships through the Dardanelles and Bosphorus into Black Sea ports in order to bring immigrants direct to America from southeastern Europe without the expense of the long haul overland to Hamburg. If an air-chamber be successively connected by pipes with a large number of tanks of compressed air, the pressure within the chamber must rise. Similarly, if a low-pressure society be connected by cheap steam-transportation with several high-pressure societies, and allows them freely to discharge into it their surplus population, the pressure in that society must rise. But for Chinese exclusion we should by this time have six or eight million Celestials in the far West, and mud villages and bamboo huts would fill the noble valleys of California. Something like this must occur as we go on draining away surplus people from larger and larger areas of high-pressure.