best market for his labour, and thus tend to equalize the condition of
labour in the various communities, raising the level of the lower paid
and lower lived at the expense of the higher paid and higher lived.

§ 10. The Water-tight Compartment Theory.--One point remains to be
mentioned. It is sometimes urged that the foreign Jews who come to our
shores do not injure our low skilled workers to any considerable extent,
because they do not often enter native trades, but introduce new trades
which would not have existed at all were it not for their presence. They
work, it is said, in water-tight compartments, competing among
themselves, but not directly competing with English workers. Now if it
were the case that these foreigners really introduced new branches of
production designed to stimulate and supply new wants this contention
would have much weight. The Flemings who in Edward III.'s reign
introduced the finer kinds of weaving into England, and the Huguenot
refugees who established new branches of the silk, glass, and paper
manufactures, conferred a direct service upon English commerce, and
their presence in the labour market was probably an indirect service to
the English workers. But this is not the case with the modern Jew
immigrants. They have not stimulated or supplied new wants. It is not
even correct to say that most of them do not directly compete with
native labour. It is true that certain branches of the cheap clothing
trade have been their creation. The cheap coat trade, which they almost
monopolize, seems due to their presence. But even here they have
established no new _kind_ of trade. To their cheap labour perhaps is due
in some cases the large export trade in cheap clothing, but even then it
is doubtful whether the work would not otherwise have been done by
machinery under healthier conditions, and have furnished work and wages
for English workers. During the last decade they have been entering more
and more into direct competition with British labour in the cabinet-