than with us. Our farmers will more and more abandon agriculture and migrate to the towns. In short we shall be consigning ourselves to a destiny of dry rot.
The wall that we have erected around us will indeed serve for a while to support a high level of prices and wages in this country, but in the long run it can not do so; for as our business will constantly be diminishing while population will be increasing the internal competition will eventually afford the correctives. There can be no real and enduring prosperity for us until and unless the normal international trade relations, which express the great international division of labor, be reestablished. The competition of Europe should be welcomed, not feared.
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Judge Gary in his address to the stockholders of the U.S. Steel Corporation at their annual meeting in 1923 blamed the present immigration law for much of the existing labor difficulty, and his words were taken under consideration in cabinet meetings in Washington. Secretary Davis in a report to the President expressed the opinion that opening the gates of immigration and flooding the country with new workers would “bring prosperity to an end.” Here we have one view of what makes “prosperity,” viz. general employment and rising wages. Superficially this is a meritorious idea, and fundamentally it would be sound if rising wages meant the general production of more goods. Under the existing conditions, however, this thought, no doubt innocently, includes a great deal that is cruel and shameless. The rising wages, of which so many are boastful, are at the direct expense of the farmers,
