Then, there is the matter of distribution. Let us take New York City by way of illustration. There the “congestion” of immigration is greater than anywhere else; and the advocates of exclusion always point to it as the crowning “awful example.” In the ’40s and ’50s that city grew almost altogether by immigration from abroad. Between 1840 and 1861 New York City increased from 312,000 to 814,000--502,000. The rate of growth, then, was just over 160 per cent. Between 1880 and 1901 the same territory increased in population from 1,200,000 to 2,050,000--850,000, and a large part of that increase was from the smaller cities, the towns and the rural districts of the United States. The ratio of increase was about 70 per cent., less than half what it was during the preceding great immigration. Further, the charitable and corrective forces, official and unofficial, at work in New York are not much occupied with the immigrants who have come in the last twenty years. The crime, the abject poverty, the destitution are among the earlier immigrants and their descendants. The later immigration is not from peoples given to excess in drink--and drunkenness is the chief cause of the miseries of crime and pauperism. Looking at the immigration problem thus numerically, we see that the pessimists and the panic-stricken are afflicted with the narrowness of geographic and historical vision which is responsible for so many jeremiads. The shriek that the nation, and especially its cities, are being “swamped” has no basis in mathematics. “But the quality! The quality!” they cry. Well, what of the quality? Turn to the files of the publications in the middle of the last century; read what the “good Americans” then said and wrote and thought of the vast in-marching armies of “foreign devils,” whose grandchildren are a valuable part of our citizenship to-day. They were “the scum of Ireland and Germany.” They were “incapable of receiving American ideas.” They were “welcomed by the rich employers because their coming meant cheap labor.” And loudest in lamentation and fiercest in demand for bars and barriers were the people who had themselves just arrived!