HERE is a strong tendency -strongest perhaps in the worthiest if not greatest minds-to contend unduly for an ideal state of society. We could not advance one step without this tendency, but the excess of it is to be guarded against in practical social science. The tendency to push some one principle through to its ideal end, to make some few laws universal, and in so doing to override other principles and laws that are less obtrusive or that wear the suspicious garb of expediency, is one which has always characterized and vitiated human thought,-balanced, indeed, and rendered serviceable by even a stronger tendency to tread the path of mere expediency. Hence such men as George Fox and Fourier, Shelley and Emerson. The thing never to be forgotten by one engaged in the study of great subjects is that every principle, law, and method has its limits, and that it is played upon by other forces that seem to be opposite. The constant temptation is to become fascinated with either unity or complexity, forgetting one while we kneel before the other. The wise man encounters no question more difficult than how far to insist on ideal, and how far to be content with imperfect, conditions. It is the steadily recurring question between the conservative and the radical, and in every-day life, without which the judgment would have no field of action, and that thing called wisdom or common sense would have no existence because no ground of exercise. To pursue ideals or to consult expediency is small tax on our powers; rightly to join them is the special function of wisdom.

This nation began its career under lofty ideals; personal liberty, freedom of conscience, social equality, government in the interest of the poor and defenseless, the contrast of the ideas and methods prevailing in Europe which prompted the first emigrations. The early settlers took up the line of progress in England, but leaped over its intermediate stages and formed a State of almost ideal perfection in its political forms. It can hardly be said that this nation developed its institutions; it decreed them, and the struggle has been to live up to them. We are finding out that we have too much liberty and too little restriction; enough law but a vast amount of lawlessness.

Liberty slips easily into license; we are impatient of restraint; we legislate in crude ways; our political action is without moral earnestness and dignity. In the main, we have followed in the line of the early ideals, but we insist on them in a blind way; we turn them into a cry and use them in a wholesale way and without much regard to consequences: "It is a free country-keep it free; the asylum of the poor and oppressed- let them come; the refuge from tyranny open wide the ports; the land of equal rights-give every man an equal chance." It will not be denied that these are brave words, full of noble sentiments, nor that the realization of them is to be sought. The only question is whether we can carry all this sail of lofty purpose and keep a steady keel; whether we must not ballast the ship of State with solid citizenship instead of filling its decks with a promiscuous throng. There is no question as to the value of liberty and equality and humanity as social factors, but only by what process they are to be realized. Public opinion inclines to the view that they are to be assumed with all their incidental evils, which are to be endured, or worked out, or left to correct themselves under their own educating and disciplining processes.

Another preliminary question-one which perplexes many minds-is: Should this nation, in view of its providential history and the divineness of its institutions, be interfered with?

a weighty question, for few will deny that there is a mysterious force directing the course of history, which is best named as Providence. To determine the relation between Divine will and human conduct is the never-settled problem in philosophy, and will not be raised here beyond saying that its application to national and to individual life is the same. Providence does not relieve either the individual or the nation from the necessity of using its faculties in determining action. It was a favorite expression of Dr. Mulford, that "the nation fulfills its vocation in freedom," by which he meant, in part, that it is itself to work out its life by self-chosen processes. It is as free as man, and is not a necessary evolution of certain forces, nor the product of certain principles blindly followed and turned into laws of fate.

Such considerations as these underlie our subject and meet in advance the position of those who would settle this question of foreign

before this country are not moral, for the moral is amenable to effort; it generates its own course, cures its own evils, and transforms by its own divine alchemy. Our problems are largely physiological,- how to mingle, or rather not mingle, our diverse bloods so that the physical stock shall not degenerate, and how to keep the strong, fine strain ascendant. We have already several such problems on hand. The fatal feature of the early importation of blacks was not slavery,- for a strong nation may long safely cherish such an institution, but their presence as a large fraction and factor of the population. This problem cannot now be touched practically; ancient wrong binds the nation hand and foot, and its outcome must be awaited as we await the gathering of tempests,-powerless to avert, and trembling over the steady approach. We have also the Indian, happily a lessening factor, and probably not one to become a bloodelement nor a political force in the national life. There is a graver problem in that immense population in the South-west, liable at any time to be increased by additions of Mexican territory, a population of mixed Spanish and Indian blood, sharing in the degeneracy of the stronger stock and the inherent weakness of the other. In California this population was overwhelmed and nearly exterminated by the sudden and vast movement from the East in '49, but in New Mexico and the Mexico that is coming such a process cannot be expected. This population will enter, a weak and vitiating element, into the national body, where it will work immense mischief. In the mingling of greatly diverse bloods the weaker drags down the stronger. Nature, in such a case, does not work towards a cure, but by destruction protests against the mistake. The Indian drew the Spanish towards itself, and the mingled blood will act in like manner,—a vitiating element, too large in these new territories to be crowded out as was done in California. This nation has already had two lessons on this subject, and has their unsolved problems on hand; namely, the negro, with whom the white mingles fatally, and the Mexican, with whom he mingles only to his hurt. It would seem to be the part of statesmanship to scrutinize this matter of race-mingling. Science is forcing theology, jurisprudence, sociology, to face facts and to change theories and methods, and it would not be amiss for statesmen to consult science as to what populations shall enter the ports of New York and San Francisco. It is the right and the duty of a nation, however originally constituted, to prevent physical degeneration of its stock. It is akin to that first duty and instinct of the individual, the preserva

tion of life,- overriding morals, or rather, creating its own law of morals. Such scientific scrutiny might embrace certain classes of certain nations, and especially that stratum of foreign population which has sunk below the average of its own national life. There is in all Europe an immense pauper class physically and mentally incapable of recuperation, fixed, like a natural species, in an enduring form, and another large class hovering on its border. In the changes brought about by steam navigation it is becoming possible for such populations to come hither in great numbers. Our wharves and cities already swarm with them, held back only by some feeble enactments as to paupers, which have regard only to our pauper institutions and not to the effect upon the vitality and well-being of the nation itself. There are no enactments that are scientific; none that make close and reasonable discrimination, or other than is based on economic interests. This is, indeed, a good general ground to go upon, based as it is on the principle that a man who can get across the Atlantic can earn his living. Property is to a certain degree an evidence of fitness, and, like children, is a hostage to fortune. But a nation is something more than economic; it is physical and intellectual and moral and political. If immigration is to be restricted at all, it should be on a basis inclusive of qualifications beyond those of property.

It is also a sound principle that a nation should secure, so far as possible, political homogeneousness.

In those nations where the government is monarchical, and therefore largely by force, there may safely be a lack of homogeneousness so long as the force is superior to the divergent influences, but in a democracy homogeneousness is the first requisite. If the people of a democracy do not think and feel within certain lines of sympathy they will not act together, and in that case the attitude of one party or class will be regarded by others as tyrannical. Government which is not understood always wears that aspect.

This nation began its career with a fair degree of homogeneousness. The Puritan and the Cavalier, the Dutchman and the Quaker, at least understood each other, and coöperated intelligently in the formation of the government. But we are to-day breeding a diversity in religions, languages, customs, conditions, blood, sentiments, and temperaments such as no nation, except possibly Russia, ever experienced. Granting the assimilating power of free and favoring institutions, of climate, food, education, and moral effort, the question remains whether the nation is able to digest the heterogeneous masses it is taking in. If we could rid

ourselves of that blind optimism which seems to be the political vice of the American people, and look at this process with a calm and measuring eye, it would wear its proper cast of audacity. Our politics play in limited fields fisheries on the North and border-quarrels on the South—and are mostly a strife of parties to get in and keep out. The questions which are bearing the nation on to an uncertain destiny are passed by and left to work themselves out as may happen. The national life has been so simple that we have not been trained to consider complex and subtle questions. The very perfection of our institutions tempts us to leave them to enforce themselves, as an engineer may be tempted to sleep before a good engine. Meanwhile, great generic changes are taking place in the composition of the nation beside which the general run of our political questions is of the smallest account. A nation must do more than administer its laws and enforce its precedents. There is no charm nor secret power in institutions that renders them self-operative or self-preserving. We dwell on the formation of the government as the great fact of our history, and honor the founders by ascribing almost the weight of law to their intentions; but questions as new and radical as those which engaged them are constantly arising, and among them is the one under discussion. Instead of an immigration from kindred stocks, mainly homogeneous in morals and political principles, as at the first, we have one literally of all sorts and conditions of men. "Let them come," cries the political optimist; "we can take care of them," indifferent to the possibility of a social compound that may explode, like carelessly mixed chemicals.

There is flowing into this country an immense stream of foreigners who are not only ignorant, in every sense of the word, but who are worn out by poverty and oppression, exhausted in vitality, and sunk below all possibility of recovery except by processes as long as those which have made them what they are. Five hundred years of political training lie behind and enter into the American citizen; it has taken that time to teach men how to vote and to govern themselves, but we are now creating their peers in as many months. These foreigners are not simply here, but they are here clad with citizenship, to act and to be used, make-weights to be thrown on the side of any party that may win them, the special tool of the saloon politician, open to bribery, ready to be massed in labor troubles and the chief factor in them. The almost hopeless complications of the labor question are wholly due to this foreign element, which not only leads and comprises

the mob, but so widens the range of the price of labor that the American laborer cannot endure the competition. Thus, the foreigner first depresses the labor market and then joins in a murderous struggle for its rise. Capital and blind statesmanship are simply reaping what they have sown: they wanted cheap labor, but, having got it, they are finding it dear,a hopeless complication, because the largest and strongest factor in it is incapable of reason, distrustful of employers and superiors, hostile to law, suspicious of all except those of its own class, capable of great endurance, and familiar only with indirect and brutal means of gaining ends; hopeless, also, because this main factor is both unfit and unwilling to enter upon the only possible solution of the labor question; namely, an intelligent and cooperative relation to employers. The ground for the elevation of this class does not yet present itself; it shows but little sign of tendency in right directions save in individual cases; the mass gravitates towards the atheistic and anarchical parties, or if it escapes this direction, it falls under the control of the saloon politicians, when the doom of its political value is irrevocably fixed. The ignorant emigrant does not fall into the embrace of free institutions and education and Christian civilization; these angels do not welcome him at Castle Garden, nor get much access to him later on. That other angel, which if not tutelar is presiding,- the saloon,- takes him in charge and educates him in its political creed of spoils and brutality. The Scandinavian peasant taking land in Minnesota is but a small sample of immigration: the greater part of it goes to the cities where already is one-tenth of our population, and it is in cities that the foreigner is to learn the graces of American citizenship. When it is remembered that the municipal governments of our larger cities are simply schools of intrigue and corruption, and occa sions of plunder to which almost any bold man can put his hand, we need not expect any great improvement in the foreigner; he becomes simply another fang of the serpent that is poisoning the life of the nation. To meet this growing influx of chaotic and depraved citizenship we have only some feeble and ineffective legislation against the importation of paupers and insane. This country can be made an asylum for the poor and oppressed, but it is neither a hospital nor a foundling institution. It is not within its vocation to receive the sick and cure them of their age-long diseases; nor the unborn, as it were, of other nations, and deliver them into political life. We are free and humane, but not for this.

This degraded and heterogeneous population is already seriously felt in both municipal and

national legislation. More and more it assumes the form of evasion and compromise and bargaining, or undisguised action in favor of some class. It busies itself about trifles in order to avoid questions of real importance. In municipal government the main feature is jobbery, and in national government, patronage and retention of power. The only steady and uncompromising force in politics is the saloon, an institution of American origin but now almost wholly in the hands of foreigners of the first or second generation,― the bright, consummate flower of the policy of unrestricted immigration. Such processes cannot go much farther without causing paralysis of legislative action. The strong point in Mr. Gladstone's Home Rule policy is his plea that the Irish question blocks legislation. But several questions of like nature are looming up in our horizon,- questions based on race or religion or deep-rooted prejudice; questions which draw their support from ignorance or climatic temperament, or from long-endured wrongs, like agrarian abuses. Such questions produce a state of things quite different from that caused by the rivalry of political parties in a homogeneous state. These are normal, and necessary to healthy political life. But the Irish member not only votes for Ireland every time, but votes against everything else; and Mr. Parnell commands the situation. The example is fraught with instruction. The struggle of England since those early conflicts which Milton describes as the "wars of kites and crows" has been to govern a heterogeneous people. This history is to be viewed favorably only on Pope's principle that "whatever is, is right," but is not a history that statesmanship should aim to repeat.

The statistics of foreign immigration and the sources of it are so well known that they scarcely need mention. In the last thirty years, seven and a half millions of immigrants have come to us,— a considerable fraction of the present population. They and their children number fifteen millions, or one-fourth of the people. During the decade ending in 1884 the immigration numbered about four millions. Much of this is in the same racial line with our own - English, Teutonic, and Scandinavian — and so far as blood goes reenforces the national type. But whatever is gained in this respect is more than offset by the blacks, and the mixed Spanish and Indian populations of the South-west, so that we still have from ten to fifteen millions utterly alien to our stock, and for the most part unfit for citizenship. Generalizing these statistics, we have the grave fact that one-fifth of our population is either of blood outside of the national strain or defective in political capacity.

It now costs thirty dollars or less to transport a Bohemian or Italian from his home to our ports, and five dollars more will place him in the middle of the continent. Absolute paupers cannot make this journey, and there are laws shutting them out, the only penalty of which is the trouble of taking back those who may be detected as paupers or insane. The feebleness of the legislation is exceeded by the weakness of its enforcement. Consequently, we are already burdened with a large element of European paupers and insane. Our beggars are nearly all foreigners, and nearly one-third of our insane are immigrants, a fact that emphasizes nearly every point that has been named. This proneness to insanity among immigrants reveals their worn-out vitality, their ignorance, and their inability to endure so great a change; it is the protest of nature against it. But there is a class just above that of the pauper, and into which it is constantly slipping, hardly more desirable, which now avails itself of this cheap transportation. The foreign element is not only increasing, but it is deteriorating. It is beneath the dignity of argument to contend that much of the immigration from Southern and Central Europe, and some also of that from England and Ireland, is unfit, on physical, moral, and political grounds, for incorporation into American life. It is equally beyond dispute that it constitutes a large factor in labor troubles, crowding the market and depressing wages below the American living point. Mr. Carroll D. Wright, in his first annual report as Commissioner of Labor, tells us that already 31.9 per cent. of our mechanical laborers are immigrants, and, while recognizing their value in some respects, finds in the fact a main cause of overproduction and excessive competition. His wise inference is that this immigration should be restricted for the sake of a sound industry. Equally weighty considerations of a political and moral nature could be urged. Baneful as the process and the degree of it are, it seems likely to go on in geometrical ratio. Larger and swifter ships, cheaper railway transportation, the crowding out in Europe, its military laws, the increasing attractions on this continent, and especially the fact that overproduction here through immigration reacts on the labor market there, such are the forces that swell the current. Thus, the greater the immigration the faster will it increase, and without possibility of end till the balance in populations and resources is reached, and America becomes, in one brief, rapid rush of changing population, another Europe,- a work which, if done at all, should fill centuries. Europe is steady and strong, so far as it is so, be