several minor points. The States have not increased in population as rapidly as was expected: the Chinese, on whom I had calculated as possible settlers, have been deterred by public feeling from coming over in any number; and though the British immigrants are now relatively fewer than they were,[1] this falling off has been compensated by a great increase in the number of immigrants from countries with a lower standard of comfort; from Italy, Norway, Bohemia, and Russia. Beyond this there was a period of great prosperity in England between 1870 and 1879, when tens of thousands found employment who in any ordinary year would have gone across the Atlantic. On the whole, these influences appear to have balanced one another; and the result is, that while immigrants are still anxious to pour in, there is a disinclination to receive them; and the American Congress has passed two rather stringent Acts (1885 and 1891) to limit immigration to fit persons, and to forbid the wholesale bringing over of workmen by employers.[2] Moreover, the emigrants who now go over are attracted by high rates of labour rather than by cheap rates of land. The best part of the country has been taken up.
Twenty years' residence under the Southern Cross has forced me to consider a new side of this particular
- ↑ In the decade 1851 to 1860 the emigration from Great Britain to the States was 1,257,000 (Mulhall's Statistics). In the last decade it has been 1,462,000 (Statesman's Year-Book). The British population of the first period was twenty per cent smaller than that of the second; while the American population of the second period offered fifty per cent more chance of employment.
- ↑ "Already signs are not wanting to show, that stringent as are its provisions, and drastic as are its regulations" (the Act of 1891), "a certain section of American opinion is beginning to demand something more stringent and more drastic still."—Wilkins on "Immigration in the United States," Nineteenth Century Review, October 1891, p. 593. Bryce's comment must be remembered: "Such laws are of course difficult of enforcement."—American Commonwealth, vol. iii. p. 674.
