One who speaks with the highest authority on questions of political economy puts the immigration problem in a strong light when he says: "We are now draining off great stagnant pools of population which no current of intellectual or moral activity has stirred for ages. Thousands and hundreds of thousands of those who represent the very lowest stage of degradation to which human beings can be reduced by hopelessness, hunger, squalor, and superstition, are found among the new citizens whom the last decade has brought into the Republic." It is known beyond doubt that prisoners' aid societies in various European countries have been steadily shipping convicts to the United States. Neither has it been an uncommon thing for criminals to be let off by the courts, on condition of their emigrating to America. It is folly for us to expect to take this great criminal class, who were born to crime in the purlieus of European cities, who have been thieves from their cradles, and who come to us fresh from jails and prisons, and change them into useful citizens. They will not only continue to be criminals themselves, but they will spread their vile and wicked contagion wherever they go. There is not a single cause of reform or progress in this country that is not constantly discouraged and postponed by these Old World tides of ignorance and vice. [Illustration: BUILDING USED BY THE BRITISH AS A HOSPITAL.] There can be no doubt that there is a rising tide of public sentiment in this country in favor of a careful and wise examination of every emigrant who offers himself as a candidate for American citizenship in the future. I think, in view of the fact that we are getting a very large and increasing proportion of our immigration from Southern Europe, which is the most illiterate portion of the Old World--in Southern Italy, for instance, seventy-nine out of every one hundred are illiterate--there ought to be an educational test. There is certainly no wisdom in our adding hundreds of thousands a year to the number of illiterates already here, who are unable to read the Declaration of Independence, and have not the faintest conception of the principles of our Constitution. The examination of emigrants ought to be on the other side of the water. We have had many recent illustrations in Boston of the manifest hardships experienced under the present arrangement. Every person intending to emigrate to America ought to be required to give notice of that desire through the nearest American Consul, and furnish a clean bill of health, both moral and physical; and no one should be permitted to sail without a certificate of such investigation and satisfactory finding. This would not shut out any one who would be of value to American institutions, but it would require European countries to care for the criminals and paupers which their own social system has bred.