will rapidly grow up to the limits of comfortable subsistence, or even beyond them, and that so long as a livelihood is easily obtained there need be no fear as to a decline of population. Immigration, on the other hand, has generally been welcomed. New countries, more especially, have kept an open door for all arrivals. The increase of population has been taken as the great test of advance, and every immigrant was looked on as additional evidence of progress. This process of development is not, however, unlimited. In the advance of a community a point is sooner or later reached at which any further addition to population does not increase the proportional amount of wealth, and then immigration may justly take the place which emigration used to occupy in the minds of the statesmen of older countries, viz., as a danger to the welfare of society. This point of view will not at once be adopted. Men do not easily change their favourite doctrines, even under the most pressing circumstances. It is more likely that some particular kind of immigration, presenting peculiarly objectionable features, will first be assailed; but there can be little doubt that the habit of criticising immigration, once formed, will act with increasing force. The attainment of this stage marks a turning point in national history, and the fact that the United States and the English colonies appear to be now approaching it, makes the study of the subject at present more interesting.
The political and social results of emigration, though not susceptible of precise treatment, yet reinforce the conclusion I have drawn from a consideration of economical conditions. Older and long settled countries have, in the course of time, less reason to regret parting with various classes of their inhabitants. Emigration is a safety-valve for any political system, more particularly as by a process of natural selection it takes off the more discontented members of a community. Germany can hardly have any reason to regret the action of an agency which relieved it of the Chicago anarchists. But the same fact naturally influences those countries which are the centres of immigration. In a rude and widely-scattered community the character of the population is of little moment. The convicts of Australia, or the gangs of outlaws who formed the early settlements in California, under the pressure of rigorous social conditions speedily settled down into law-abiding citizens. Nor, if we can trust their early historians, was the case different with the Pilgrim Fathers. An able American writer has put this point very clearly:—
"We are no longer in that vigorous early civilization, when we could digest almost anything sent to us, and when the very conditions of life here corrected and controlled the weaknesses of the immigrants. In a frontier life the new-comer not only has a chance to begin anew, but, in a sense, he is obliged to do so. He is thrown on himself, and obliged to look out for himself. On the other hand, he is controlled by the rough justice which is dealt out between man and man. The code of morality may be rude, but he is obliged to conform to it." [1]
The progress of society weakens this power of assimilation. A state of settled political type, and with deeply-rooted social and
- ↑ Prof. R. M. Smith, Political Science Quarterly, March, 1888, p. 68.
