States. But they also resent the dislocations of industry, the fallow
fields, the dodging of military service, and the disturbance of the level
of prices which such wholesale emigrations inflict upon the mother
country.

Since the protagonists of unrestricted immigration have taken largely an
economic line of argument, it seemed desirable to accept their terms, and
meet them on their own ground. But I should not wish to be misunderstood
as limiting the immigration question to its economic phases. When we have
said that the _latifondisti_ of Southern Italy are in despair at the
scarcity of laborers to work their lands at starvation wages, and that the
railway builders and mine operators of America are equally anxious to have
those selfsame South Italian laborers for their own exploitive
enterprises, we have told a bare half of the tale. There remain all those
cultural, educational, political, religious and domestic variations and
adjustments which make up the general problem of assimilability of the
alien and of the strength of our own national digestion. America had a
giant's undiscriminating appetite in the great days of expansion from 1850
to 1890. But there are many signs, economic and other, that we can no
longer play Gargantua and continue a healthy nation. An unwise engineer
sometimes over-stokes his boilers, and courts disaster. Is it not equally
possible that national welfare may suffer from an over-dose of human fuel
in our industry?




THE WAY TO FLATLAND