and industry, to developing the vast unpeopled tracts from the
Mississippi to the Pacific, and to exploiting the hitherto
neglected or unknown natural resources of the country. Every year
science furnished new methods of converting nature's products
into man's wealth. Chemistry, the doubtful science, Midas-like,
turned into gold every thing that it touched. There were not
native workers enough, and so a steady stream of foreign
immigrants flocked over from abroad. They came at first to better
their own fortunes by sharing in the unlimited American harvests.
Later, our Captains of Industry, regardless of the quality of the
new comers, and intent only on securing cheap labor to multiply
their hoards, combed the lowest political and social levels of
southern Europe and of western Asia for employees. The immigrants
ceased to look upon America as the Land of Promise, the land
where they intended to settle, to make their homes, and to rear
their children; it became for them only a huge factory where they
earned a living and for which they felt no affection. On the
contrary, many of them looked forward to returning to their
native country as soon as they had saved up a little competence
here. The politicians, equally negligent of the real welfare of
the United States, gave to these masses of foreigners quick and
unscrutinized naturalization as American citizens.

So it fell out that before the end of the nineteenth century a
great gulf was opening between Labor and Capital. Now a community
can thrive only when all its classes feel that they have COMMON
interests; but since American Labor was largely composed of
foreigners, it acquired a double antagonism to Capital. It had
not only the supposed natural antagonism of employee to employer,
but also the further cause of misunderstanding, and hostility