“While some great employers favor unrestricted immigration because it gives them cheap labor, the labor unions may reach the conclusion that for that very reason unrestricted immigration must be harmful to their interests, because it will lead inevitably to a reduction of wages. When the supply of labor is much in excess of the demand the maintenance of a high wage scale becomes impossible. “While a large percentage of the immigration is unskilled labor, it must be remembered that many unions are composed of men who do that kind of labor. Moreover, some of them will learn trades and increase the number of skilled workers. When times grow dull there will be an excess of workers and wages will go down. The labor organizations belonging to the American Federation of Labor asked the last Congress to bar out illiterate immigrants. The object was to keep down the undesirable cheap labor immigration. The steamship companies, which make money off their steerage passengers and drum up business throughout eastern Europe, and some western railroads which are extending their lines, protested against and defeated the legislation ‘organized labor’ petitioned for. Considering the swelling tide of immigration, much of it of an undesirable nature, the labor leaders probably will ask the next Congress in emphatic language to order the exclusion of illiterates to protect American labor and the high standard of American citizenship.” CHAPTER II THE PATHWAYS OF THE FUTURE The open and abounding West is no more. From California, from all the interior regions of the great dry plains rises the same cry, that the government should take measures to give the people more land; that by means of irrigation it should restore, in some measure at least, the opportunities which allured the men who in the old days followed in the pilgrimage “out West.” This changed and restricted region has problems entirely different from those of the West that was.