ent the "poor whites."
Branches of the clothing industry in New York began with English and
Scotch tailors, were then captured by Irish and Germans, then by Russian
Jews, and lastly by Italians, while in Boston the Portuguese took a
share, and in Chicago the Poles, Bohemians, and Scandinavians. Almost
every great manufacturing and mining industry has experienced a similar
substitution of races. As rapidly as a race rises in the scale of
living, and through organization begins to demand higher wages and
resist the pressure of long hours and overexertion, the employers
substitute another race and the process is repeated. Each race comes
from a country lower in the scale than that of the preceding, until
finally the ends of the earth have been ransacked in the search for low
standards of living combined with patient industriousness. Europe has
been exhausted, Asia has been drawn upon, and there remain but three
regions of the temperate zones from which a still lower standard can be
expected. These are China, Japan, and India. The Chinese have been
excluded by law, the Japanese and Koreans are coming in increasing
numbers, and the Indian coolies remain to be experimented upon. That
employers will make strenuous efforts to bring in these last remaining
races in the progressive decline of standards, to repeal the Chinese
prohibitive laws and to prevent additions to these laws, naturally
follows from the progress toward higher standards and labor
organization already made by the Italian and the Slav.

The trade-union is often represented as an imported and un-American
institution. It is true that in some unions the main strength is in the
English workmen. But the majority of unionists are immigrants and
children of immigrants from countries that know little of unionism.
Ireland and Italy have nothing to compare with the trade-union movement
of England, but the Irish are the most effective organizers of the
American unions, and the Italians are becoming the most ardent
unionists. Most remarkable of all, the individualistic Jew from Russia,
contrary to his race instinct, is joining the unions. The American
unions, in fact, grow out of American conditions, and are an American
product. Although wages are two or three times as high as in his
European home, the immigrant is driven by competition and the pressure
of employers into a physical exertion which compels him to raise his
standard of living in order to have strength to keep