came Americanized, they showed in the trade unions which they
organized the remarkable qualities for political leadership which the
Irish and Irish-Americans have ever since displayed in this country.
The important role which Irish and Irish-American men have played in
the councils of American trade unionism is well known, and their power
today remains very great. So as regards the women, by glancing over
the past we can readily trace the influence of the Irish girl, in the
efforts after organization, unsuccessful as these often were. It was
Maggie McNamara who led the Brooklyn Female Burnishers' Association
in 1868. It was during the sixties that Kate Mullaney was leading her
splendid body of Troy laundresses, and twenty years later we find
Leonora Barry, another Irish girl, as the leading spirit among the
women of the Knights of Labor.

Except in isolated instances, no other race has come to the front
among working-women until recently. We read of German women and
Bohemian women as faithful unionists. But Germans, Bohemians and
Scandinavians advanced or lost ground along with the others. By this
time, moreover, the nation had become more habituated to absorbing
immigrants from various nations, and the distinction between races
was less accentuated after a few years' residence. On the part of the
Germans and Scandinavians, amalgamation has been so speedy, and in the
end so complete, that most of those who have been here some time, and
invariably the children of the first-comers, are Americans through and
through.

With the foreign peoples that we have with us today, the situation
is somewhat different. Certain general principles are common to the
course of all these migrations. They originate, on the one hand, in
economic pressure, complicated not unfrequently with religious wars or
persecutions, and on the other, in the expectation of better times
in a new country. They meet the demands of a new country, asking for
labor, and are further subject to the inducements of agents. Under our
haphazard social arrangements, the newly arrived often meet wretched
conditions, and have no means of knowing how they are being used to
lower yet further wages for themselves and others.

Always, whatever their own descent and history, the older inhabitants
feel resentment, knowing no more than their unfortunate rivals what
is the underlying reason of the trouble. Milder forms of antagonism
consist in sending the immigrant workers "t